Practical management and treatment of pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors

Even though pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (NETs) are slow growing and are not as aggressive as invasive ductal carcinomas of the pancreas, once unresectable metastases has occurred, it would become life-threatening sooner or later and cure would be highly unlikely. The US Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) database from the year 1973 to 2004 suggests that pancreatic NETs are account for 3.6% of all NETs (1). Pancreatic NETs are rare subgroup of pancreatic tumors and represent about 1-2% of all pancreatic neoplasms (2). The incidence and prevalence of overall NETs has increased substantially, and the incidence of pancreatic NETs alone has also increased in the data of each primary tumor site (3). Recently, increased incidental lesions of the pancreatic NETs may be led by the increasing of availability of advanced imaging examinations (4,5). The developments of imaging modalities that allow the hemodynamics monitoring of the pancreatic tumors have made accurate diagnoses of the most of pancreatic NETs easy because the typical pancreatic NETs are hypervascular