Why choose Mayo Clinic for pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors

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Thorvardur Halfdanarson, M.D., Medical Oncologist, Department of Oncology, Mayo Clinic: What I think Mayo has to offer is really being a full service station, if you will, for all things pancreatic. Where there’s really a team approach to diagnosing and treating neuroendocrine tumors.

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We have the expert in neuroendocrine and pancreatic pathologists who can make these diagnoses with surgical oncologists or hepatobiliary surgeons who do these operations all the time.

PNETs, or pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors, are less than 10% of pancreatic malignancies, although they are becoming more common and tend to be much slower growing than pancreatic adenocarcinomas. Sometimes these tumors just make hormones and it’s the hormones that make you sick, not the tumor itself. Sometimes the tumors just grow to be large and start causing pain.

So changes in the treatment of pancreatic neuron tumors have definitely occurred over the last several years. For the early stage, PNET patients who have small tumors, low-grade tumors as seen on the biopsy, we can sometimes wait and we don’t always have to operate. And then most recently we have the PRRT, or the peptide receptor radionuclide therapy, probably the most promising treatment out there. So this treatment results in tumor shrinkage in probably as high as 20% to 30% of the patients. The treatment is well tolerated. It’s very safe.

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Patients with neuron tumors who are seen at large volume specialized centers seem to do better than the average patients out there. So I think the treatment at Mayo may result in a better outcome.

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