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Received Feb 5, 2017; Accepted Jun 12, 2017
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
1. Introduction
Pancreatic cancer is the fourth most common cause of cancer death in Western countries with an overall 2-year survival rate of less than 10% [1–3]. Currently, surgical resection is the only curative option for patients with pancreatic cancer. However, approximately 80% of these patients present with unresectable locally advanced pancreatic cancer (LAPC) at the time of diagnosis, as a result of the late clinical presentation of disease symptoms [4]. The most common presenting symptoms are asthenia (86%), anorexia (85%), weight loss (85%), abdominal pain (79%), and choluria (59%) with jaundice [5, 6].
It is known that pancreatic cancer may affect the nutritional status through anorexia, an elevated resting energy expenditure (REE) as well as through exocrine pancreatic insufficiency (EPI), leading to fecal losses of energy, macro-, and micronutrients [7–11]. Subsequently, diarrhea, steatorrhea, and abdominal pain may affect quality of life (QoL) of patients [12].
Although pancreatic cancer has been associated with a poor nutritional status and QoL, little quantitative data of these aspects is available in patients with LAPC [9, 10, 13]. Most previous studies examined only one or two aspects of nutritional status or QoL in a group of pancreatic cancer patients, which has resulted in an incomplete overview of the contribution of each aspect to the decline of nutritional status in these patients. Therefore, the aim of this study is to describe a comprehensive assessment of the nutritional status, intestinal digestion and absorption, and QoL, including the contribution of exocrine pancreatic insufficiency in one group of patients...