Patrick Swayze’s widow calls for more research into pancreatic cancer

Patrick Swayze’s widow, Lisa Niemi Swayze, spoke in Washington this week about a bill that would make pancreatic cancer a federal research priority, according to a CNN report.

Swayze died nearly a year and a half ago from the disease, nearly 22 months after being diagnosed. This was actually an uncommonly long amount of time to survive; as the National Center for Biotechnology Information points out, average survival is usually less than a year.

That may be in part because pancreatic cancer doesn’t manifest symptoms at first and is generally caught at a later stage, according to the center -- and perhaps why it’s the fourth most common cause of cancer death in the United States.

Among the risk factors for pancreatic cancer? Being over 60, being black, being overweight, smoking. Half of these, you’ll notice, are factors people have no control over, and the other half are things that can probably be changed. The advantage to controlling weight and quitting smoking, of course, is that doing so reduces the risk of a host of other cancers and conditions. Just some food for thought.

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