Primary care vs. oncology-driven surveillance following adjuvant chemotherapy in resected pancreas cancer

This poster from the 2017 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium highlights a new Canadian initiative to compare current practice of pancreatic cancer surveillance to primary care based surveillance of patients following surgical resection and adjuvant chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer. The study involved 147 patients who were either surveilled by their oncologist or their primary care physician. There was no difference in survival of patients between the two groups but it was found that surveillance tests and imaging performed earlier by oncologists detected tumour recurrence earlier than the follow-up by primary care providers. The study suggests that primary care physicians could play a larger role in the follow-up of care in patients with resected pancreatic cancer. View the poster here. (requires subscription to ASCO) View the poster abstract here.