Here's what the scientists at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute found (and here's why this matters in a huge way to people interested in healthy living):
- It takes 11.7 years for one mutation in a pancreas cell to grow into a "mature" pancreatic tumor (which might show up on a medical scan)
- It takes another 6.8 years for the pancreatic tumor to spread and cause tumors to appear in other organs of the body.
- In all, it takes about 20 years for a person to grow a cancer tumor and see it spread to the point where their doctor will diagnose them with pancreatic cancer.
- In other words, by the time doctors diagnose you with cancer, you've already been growing it for two decades.