Pancreatic Cancer on the Rise Among Younger Adults

Following the Oct. 14, 2025 death of R&B singer D’Angelo from pancreatic cancer at the age of 51, CURE spoke with a pair of experts about rising incidence of the disease among younger adults.

Dr. Rosario Ligestri, Chief of Gastroenterology and the Director of the Pancreas Center at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey and Dr. Anna Berkenblit, Chief Scientific and Medical Officer for the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network (PanCAN), sat down for interviews with CURE.

Transcript

Introduction: Every now and then a news story comes along that just stops you in your tracks, a story that's not just about one person's tragedy, but feels more like a warning sign for all of us. Today, we're going to dive into one of those stories and the critical health trend it's suddenly thrown into the spotlight. The music world recently lost a true titan, a voice that defined a generation for so many of us, but his passing at just 51 years old isn't only a heartbreaking loss, it's also a wake-up call, and that right there, that's really the jumping off point for what we're talking about. Today, we're going to explore what experts are saying about this really concerning trend, one that D'Angelo's story has unfortunately forced into the public conversation.

Ligestri: On average, when we when we looked at prior statistics, generally we start to think about pancreatic cancer being a disease of increased incidence in patients greater than the age of 50 to 55 but more recently, we found that there's actually a rising incidence in patients age 15 to 39 which is truly shocking statistic and certainly alters our perception of really what we think of as pancreatic cancer in an older population. This came to light over the last few years, that for whatever reason, there are a group of cancers, particularly GI malignancies, that are on the rise in young people.

And if we stopped and thought about why that might be and why you're seeing this, there are only a handful of risk factors that we can kind of think about, at the very top it's probably things like morbid obesity and cigarette smoking and alcohol consumption, things that are commonly seen in a younger population and at the same time probably have some role to play in some of these cancer incidences. But again, it's a real phenomenon. You know, in the earlier part of this year, in one of our larger journals, in JAMA, they looked at from 2000 to 2021 and you found 4% increased incidence in that age group, which, again, is just truly shocking that you would have pancreatic cancer under the age of 39 but it's something that we certainly see and defies explanation to some degree.

Berkenblit: It is a tragedy that D'Angelo, his life was cut short by pancreatic cancer, 51 is certainly young. And the average age of people who die of pancreatic cancer is usually in the mid 60s, so 51 is definitely on the young side. And what we do know is, like other cancers, like colorectal cancer in particular, more cancers are being diagnosed in younger people, more pancreatic cancers.

Ligestri: The most important thing of all of this is early detection. We really think that it's one of those things where we don't think about younger patients, but the increased awareness matters a lot. And when we when we see deaths like this, it raises the interest level of the national audience to whether or not this is something that is something that might be common and might potentially affect them. So the most important thing that we see is early detection.

When is it that you can actually do something about pancreatic cancer? Well, when it's very small and very limited to the pancreas. So surgery plays still the biggest role in how we manage these patients. And again, if you stop and thought about that, it makes a lot of sense that if patients are in kind of an early detection mindset or an early detection program, they'll find things when they're small and otherwise operable. As time has gone on, we've discovered that there have been some advancements in chemotherapy for patients with pancreatic cancer, but by and large, chemotherapy still plays a secondary role to surgery. Unfortunately, one of the newer therapies, like immunotherapy, that has been very successful in other GI malignancies, like colon cancer, doesn't play a very big role in pancreatic cancer. Pancreatic cancer seems to be immune to immunotherapy, as it were, it's a tumor that is very difficult to treat immunologically, largely due to the tumor microenvironment, basically the area of the pancreas around where the tumor lives, suppresses the immune system locally. So it's really not a very good treatment option. So we're really limited still to surgery being the number one most effective treatment, and there have been some surgical refinements since the surgery was first introduced in the 1940s but not nearly enough to resect everybody all the way to chemotherapy, which is certainly used in a supportive role.

Transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

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