Patrick Swayze Battling Pancreatic Cancer

http://www.abcnews.go.com/Health/OnCall/story?id=4396882&page=1



Patrick Swayze Faces Tough Cancer Battle, Doctors Say
'Dirty Dancing' Star Likely Faces Stiff Odds Against Deadly Disease

Patrick Swayze will likely face an uphill battle in his fight against pancreatic cancer, physicians say.

The actor's publicists released a statement Wednesday, after reports in the National Enquirer and other publications said doctors had told the "Dirty Dancing" star he had only five weeks left to live.

"Patrick has a very limited amount of disease and he appears to be responding well to treatment thus far," George Fisher, Swayze's physician, said in the statement. "All of the reports stating the time frame of his prognosis and his physical side effects are absolutely untrue. We are considerably more optimistic."

But even though the five-week time frame trumpeted by tabloids may be false, cancer specialists say that pancreatic cancer more often than not comes with a daunting prognosis.

Indeed, according to statistics from the National Cancer Institute, patients diagnosed with the disease have only a one-in-20 shot of being alive five years after the cancer is found. And the patient advocacy group Pancreatic Cancer Action Network pegs the average life expectancy for a patient diagnosed with pancreatic cancer that has spread at three to six months.

Part of the reason that this cancer is so deadly is that there is no reliable screening test for the disease. Adding to the problem is the fact that the symptoms that indicate the presence of the illness are easy to miss or misclassify -- abdominal pains, loss of appetite, weight loss and possible jaundice.