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7 slides generated from the cancer page, with a quiz from the open benchmark and speaker notes that cite the sources. Arrow keys move between slides; Print gives one slide per page.
Colloid carcinoma is a rare form of pancreatic cancer in which the cancer cells float in large pools of mucus rather than forming glands in dense scar. It usually grows out of an intestinal-type IPMN in the main pancreatic duct, presents as a larger but lower-stage tumour, and has a clearly better outlook after surgery than ordinary pancreatic cancer.
What it is. Colloid carcinoma is defined by nodular pools of extracellular mucin containing scanty malignant cells, making up more than 80 percent of the tumour (Adsay 2001); the 2019 WHO classification lists it as a variant of ductal adenocarcinoma (Nagtegaal 2020). In more than half of the defining series it was the invasive component of an IPMN (9 of 17) or an MCN (1 of 17), and KRAS codon 12 mutations were found in only 4 of 12 cases studied, fewer than in ordinary ductal cancer.
How it differs from its parent. Patients present with larger tumours (mean 5.3 cm) but lower stage; two- and five-year survival were 70 and 57 percent against 28 and 12 percent for 82 resectable ordinary ductal adenocarcinomas at the same centre, and ten patients were alive without disease at a median of 79 months, four of them despite lymph node metastases (Adsay 2001). Among invasive IPMNs, colloid and oncocytic carcinomas kept a favourable outcome after stage matching while tubular carcinomas did not; colloid carcinomas arose only from intestinal-type IPMNs and mostly from main-duct disease (Mino-Kenudson 2011), and in a matched series tubular histology carried 3.7 times the hazard of death of colloid histology (Yopp 2011).
| Setting | Approach | Guideline |
|---|---|---|
| Resectable | Pancreatoduodenectomy or distal pancreatectomy with the IPMN, followed by adjuvant chemotherapy as for ductal adenocarcinoma; the remaining gland is kept under surveillance because IPMN is a field disease. | not mapped |
| Advanced | Treated as pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma: resection with adjuvant chemotherapy when removable, the chemotherapy rows of the parent page when not; the parent record carries the trials. | not mapped |