Early pancreatic cancer - The role of endoscopic ultrasound with or without tissue acquisition in diagnosis and staging

Abstract

Pancreatic cancer (PC) is one of the deadliest cancers with a 5-year overall survival of less than 6%. Due to its insidious clinical course and unspecific symptoms, the diagnosis is usually late, with only 15-20% patients presenting with potentially curable disease. It is, therefore, extremely important to identify patients with PC at early stages of the disease when tumors may be amenable to surgical resection. For unresectable and borderline resectable PC it is consensual to perform a biopsy to have a cyto/histological confirmation of malignancy before treatment. However, for patients presenting with promptly resectable disease, the role of biopsy is more debatable. There are, in the literature, arguments both for and against the usefulness of a preoperative biopsy. Endoscopic ultrasound (EUS) is an important technique assisting in the diagnosis and staging of PC. EUS-guided tissue acquisition is a well-established tool to demonstrate the malignant nature of a pancreatic lesion. This review focuses on the role of EUS in the diagnosis and staging of PC, and highlights the controversy related to the role of EUS-guided tissue acquisition in the preoperative assessment of patients presenting with promptly resectable tumors (early PC).

Keywords: EUS; EUS-tissue acquisition; Early pancreatic cancer; Staging.