Diabetes... or the first sign of killer pancreatic cancer? How screening people with the disease could save thousands of lives
Backing this drive is PCA founder Ali Stunt, who discovered she had pancreatic cancer a year after being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, despite being a healthy size 10.
This year Ali, now 51, celebrated an astonishing ten years survival.
Fewer than one per cent of pancreatic cancer patients live for this long. The disease has the worst survival rate of any cancer, with 80 per cent of sufferers diagnosed too late for lifesaving treatment.
Ali said: Even though it was picked up relatively early, its proximity to major blood vessels would soon have rendered the cancer inoperable.
Experts are issuing the advice as they believe that the blood sugar condition suffered by four million Britons may be an early warning sign of the aggressive tumours, which are typically discovered too late to treat
Research has shown that pancreatic cancer patients will have visited their GP four times on average before being referred to a specialist for a scan. I saw mine more than that. But type 2 diabetes not associated with weight gain is often one of the earliest signs of pancreatic cancer, as it was in my case. If GPs began routinely screening these patients, it may lead to the disease being picked up earlier.
Ali, a mother-of-two who lives with financier husband Phil, 53, in Haslemere, Surrey, was diagnosed after being referred to a pancreatic specialist who immediately admitted her to hospital for a CT scan.
Within five days, she was having a five-hour operation to remove a large tumour. After six months of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, she quit her job studying meteorites to set u
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