Researchers reported recently that years and even decades to develop ate taken by pancreatic cancer that grows slowly. And this will enable the cancer to be diagnosed early making it easy to get treated.

They added that pancreatic cancer is one of the most lethal cancers and is a silent killer as no symptoms are visible until it reaches an advanced stage.

Dr Bert Vogelstein of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, who helped lead the study said, "That provides a large window of opportunity to try to detect the presence of these cancers in the first 20 years of their existence, before they become lethal. If one can do that, one can in principle cure them by surgery."

Samples of tissues were collected by Vogelstein's team that is working with British researchers at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the University of Cambridge. These samples were collected during autopsies immediately after patients died from pancreatic cancer.

Patients who had undergone surgeries to get their tumor removed were also the ones who gave samples.

After comparing the DNA mutations in the primary tumor to the secondary tumors in the liver and other organs, researchers reached the above conclusions.