Chemoprevention for pancreatic cancer.

For a number of solid tumors, including pancreatic cancer, efforts aimed at disease prevention may be more successful than currently available anticancer treatments. While specific interventions are emerging to prevent breast, prostate, lung, and colorectal cancer, no trials of chemoprevention are being conducted in pancreatic cancer. Importantly, there are significant obstacles to the conduct of such research. However, preclinical and epidemiologic studies suggest that several drugs may have chemopreventive potential in pancreatic cancer. These include aspirin and other non-steroidal antiinflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), selective cyclooxygenase inhibitors, somatostatin analogs, selective estrogen receptor modulators (SERMs), and anti-androgenic agents. As the oncology community evaluates some of these agents in large chemoprevention trials for breast, colon, and prostate cancer, it may be found that pancreatic cancer prevention occurs as an unintended, but desirable consequence. Moreover, other general societal trends, such as smoking cessation and the widespread use of cholesterol-lowering agents and aspirin, could have a role in reducing the risk of pancreatic cancer, and in the future, may lead to a decrease in its incidence.