Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
The PancChat Podcast is a collaborative effort from Let’s Win Pancreatic Cancer and the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network (PanCAN), inspired by the long-running #PancChat Twitter/X chat.
Hosted by award-winning journalist Alisyn Camerota, each episode features conversations with leading researchers, clinicians, patients, and advocates who are shaping the future of pancreatic cancer care and research. Together, we deliver expert insights, personal journeys, and the latest breakthroughs—bridging the gap between science and lived experience.
Whether you’re a patient, caregiver, healthcare professional, or simply want to learn more, join us to connect, be inspired, and learn how you can help to accelerate progress in the fight against pancreatic cancer.
Julie Fleshman: Hi, I'm Julie Fleshman, President and CEO of PanCAN. Thank you for joining. On today's podcast, we will learn about managing diabetes during pancreatic cancer treatment, an important topic for patients and caregivers navigating this side of care.
Alisyn Camerota: Hi everyone, welcome to PancChat. I'm your host, Alisyn Camerota. We want to thank our sponsor Revolution Medicines. Now in our last episode, we learned about the link between diabetes and pancreatic cancer. Today, our focus shifts to living with and managing both of these diseases at the same time.
Our guest today is Dr. Afreen Shariff. Dr. Shariff is the Director of the Duke Onco-Endocrinology Program and an Associate Director for the Cancer Therapy Toxicity Program at Duke Center for Cancer Immunotherapy. She holds a faculty appointment as an Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism at Duke University School of Medicine.
Her clinical work and research are focused on high-value care for endocrine disease like diabetes in cancer patients. Dr. Shariff, thanks so much for being here.
Dr. Afreen Shariff: Well, thank you for having me on this podcast.
Alisyn Camerota: This will be a very helpful conversation for people. So let's talk about the patients who are having to manage diabetes and pancreatic cancer simultaneously. That sounds quite complicated. How hard is it? It is quite hard.
And if you know, I always teach this to my students and residents.
Dr. Afreen Shariff: If you find a patient with diabetes and cancer, give them a hug because that's very hard. And I think you mentioned it correctly, living with the dual diagnosis. I'm gonna emphasize living because that is a big deal, and that is a very important thing when you're dealing with cancer. And there's such importance given to the cancer part of it that we're forgetting the living part of it. Right?
The living, breathing individual that is going through a disease every single day, multiple times a day has to deal with something like diabetes. So I think that living part of it, I underscore that, I emphasize that because I want my patient to thrive and not just survive when they have cancer. Right? I think that it's a big distinction in how we are treating our patients, talking to our patients and individuals with cancer today is we don't wanna use the word survive. We wanna use the word thrive because it really is about coexisting in this ecosystem where your body is harmonizing or trying to harmonize all these two or three different comorbidities or or different entities that are trying to interact with each other.
It is complex. And the reason pancreatic cancer and diabetes are so closely interlinked is because the pancreas is the factory that manufactures insulin. So if you have cancer in the factory that manufactures insulin or you have treatments or someone has removed your pancreas or part of your pancreas, you're receiving radiation, you're receiving toxic chemicals in the form of chemotherapy to target your pancreas, you are going to develop diabetes as an on target effect of these medications. It is not a side effect. It is an on target effect.
You are trying to kill cells within the pancreas and the treatments don't choose between the good ones and the bad ones unfortunately. So that is why this type of intersection or interaction between diabetes and among all the other cancers, pancreatic cancer is the most closely linked. And that's why there is a reason to raise importance around this. And when I started doing this with 10, some 15 years ago, there were very few endocrinologists that would actually talk about or work with oncologists, right? We're seeing more of that these days.
And I paused when I was in training many years ago and asked, “Why are there no endocrinologists working with oncologists?”
I mean, pancreatic cancer is not new, cancer is not new, diabetes is not new. And we've dealt with these problems since cancer and its treatments have always evolved. And we're talking at least a century. But what happened in the last few years is that we have a shift.
We have a shift that the cancer treatments have become better, for the benefit of everyone in this world. We have the most number of cancer survivors we have ever had in the history of our existence. And that is a big win for science. And that is why it's so important to think of the thrive and living with part of it now more than it has ever been. These problems always existed.
There's never been a pancreatic cancer that people would not think about diabetes, but we're thinking about it more because we have people living with these two conditions longer. And that is a great problem to have, which puts a responsibility to us to talk about it, to educate patients, educate our physicians and providers, and educate the entire community that we can continue to push this under the rug. It is an important thing that needs to go hand in hand. You need to give equal importance to both sides of the coin.
Alisyn Camerota: Why weren't endocrinologists on the teams until recently, as you say?
Dr. Afreen Shariff: I think it's also about the silos in which we practice. Right? The body never works in silos. The body works in harmony with each other. Every system is talking beautifully to another system, almost like an orchestra is playing inside your body to create a harmony.
And that's how the body works and that's how medicine should work. But that's not how the traditional medicine was practiced because oncology lived in a different world and oncologists always managed their own side effects. But with the immunotherapy era, with the CAR T cells bispecifics, all the newer treatments, oncologists have now needed to open their shell up because this this is the kind of expertise they don't have. Right? And now they have to collaborate.
They have to work in a team based approach with not just people within the oncology world, which is already a team based sport. You also have to work with this other layer of specialists to manage side effects, and you have to pass the baton at the right time at the right moment between teams. And I think the safety guardrails are very important. Some things can be managed by oncologists, some things can be managed by primary care, some things need to be managed by endocrinologists. And I think the most important thing in medicine is know what you know, but even more important is know what you don't know, because that's where really we cross the lines of safety with what's right and what's the best for our patients sitting in front of us.
Alisyn Camerota: Excellent. Okay, so how do the pancreatic cancer treatments – I'm thinking of chemotherapy, radiation, surgery, immunotherapy – how do those affect diabetes?
Dr. Afreen Shariff: Great question. So about 30 to 50% of individuals walking into pancreatic cancer have diabetes or pre-diabetes. As you can imagine, if there's something growing within the pancreas, the factory that manufactures insulin, diabetes is almost a symptom and a sign of pancreatic cancer. Right? When you look at that.
And then once they get into their pancreatic cancer treatments, about 40% of individuals develop diabetes as a consequence of one of the above that you mentioned. Right? There's a surgery. That means you're removing part of the factory, number one. You're doing chemotherapy where you're giving toxic chemicals to destroy some of that factory.
Right? And you're giving radiation, which again does the same thing as destroys of those cells. And it's not picking and choosing between this is a good one and this is not a good one. This is cancer. This is noncancer.
I'm just gonna destroy this. Right? So that's when 40% of individuals who don't have diabetes actually develop diabetes as a consequence of the above. Now if you just purely look at chemotherapy, immunotherapy, radiation, and you look at surgery, that itself can cause diabetes. But there's another layer to this.
Most chemotherapy regimens that are given to pancreatic cancer treatments have steroids as part of their treatment. And steroids are dexamethasone commonly given to reduce chemotherapy side effects like the nauseas and the itching and the neuropathy that comes along with routine regimens that are commonly prescribed to individuals with pancreatic cancer. And dexamethasone is given typically two to three days, part of every two weeks of their chemotherapy. Most patients don't even realize that they're getting steroids. They just tell them this is pretreatment for your cancer.
So I think that's very important to ask. Is my pretreatment, does that include steroids? Is that steroid dexamethasone? And dexamethasone is notorious because it raises blood sugars and it does it for a few days. And the problem is that these are given every two weeks.
You get a high dose of dexamethasone, typically 12 milligrams on the day of chemotherapy. Often patients don't even know about this because they're getting some pills in a little cup and they're asked to swallow it. And there's like five of them or six different kinds and they don't ask. They don't know. Right?
Or they're not educated about what they're taking in. And now they're surprised. I'm so tired. What's going on? I can't sleep.
I'm so wired. It's because of the steroids that they're getting. And when they go home, they're asked to take eight milligrams, which is typically two pills of dexamethasone on day two and day three, and then nothing for two weeks, and then it repeats itself. So now think about it. There is a cancer or a treatment that reduces insulin production where you can't make insulin, and then you're giving a pretreatment drug or a chemotherapy side effect focused drug for three days every 15 days that raises your blood sugars significantly.
And you're telling people that, hey, you know what, you're probably going to feel bad because it's chemotherapy. But a lot of that can be treated if you treat the high blood sugars which are arising as a consequence of the two things that I mentioned. So I can tell you the number of times I have patients walking into my clinic, and we actually at Duke, we have a collaboration, with the Center for Pancreatic Cancer, because I said you cannot do multidisciplinary pancreatic cancer anything without having an endocrinologist in that team. I mean, you're dealing with the organ that manufactures insulin. Let's give it some respect.
So, we have a strong collaboration. So at our center, we have people coming in for pretreatment counseling. So they come in and when they get diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and they have diabetes or pre-diabetes, they come to our clinic, which is the endocrinology clinic. They get educated on insulin. They get educated on all of the above because their treatments are going to cause diabetes even if they don't have it right now.
Right? Because they're getting chemotherapy, then they get for surgery, then they get radiation. That's usually the routine of traditional treatments for pancreatic cancer. So all of these are going to happen. And the best time for me to catch the patient is when they have not even started any of this, because that's the time that they can absorb information.
They can learn about diabetes, about insulin. And which brings me to the next question. I'm sure you have this question. What is the best treatment, for diabetes in pancreatic cancer?
Alisyn Camerota: Yes, that is my next question.
Dr. Afreen Shariff: There you go.
Alisyn Camerota: There's the treatment we can talk about both of this that the doctor provides and then there's ways I assume that the patient themselves can manage it. Let's start there.
Dr. Afreen Shariff: Perfect. So as I mentioned earlier, right, and I'm gonna keep repeating myself as the factory that manufactures insulin. Right? So when a factory manufactures insulin and the factory shuts down, is broken down, removed, you cannot make insulin. And there's no other part in your body that manufactures insulin.
It is your pancreas, and that's it. So when the pancreas is unavailable to make enough insulin or does not make any insulin, you have to outsource that job. And we outsource it to manufacturers of insulin who manufacture insulin that looks like what your body makes a very similar hormone, and we put it back into someone's body in the form of injections, and that is insulin. Right? So we're basically trying to simulate what the body's natural pancreas does through insulin that is manufactured and given back to the individual.
So there is no replacement for insulin. Someone gets diagnosed with diabetes from pancreatic cancer, the first step we do is to figure out how much insulin is that patient making on their own. Because you could be making less, you couldn't be making nothing, or you could still be making some. But remember, because you're making something on day zero does not mean that in two months after all these treatments, you're still gonna be making the same. Right?
So that might still change. But nonetheless, that's the first thing we do in our clinic at Onco-Endocrinology is we test people, and there's certain markers in the blood that can be detected through a blood test that tell us how much insulin is currently being manufactured, right? It helps dictate, does this patient need insulin now? Or does this patient need insulin maybe in the future? Or I just need to monitor this patient closely and give them a continuous glucose monitor, for example, that people wear on their arms that watches their blood sugars, they can inform me when they see a blood sugar that is above a certain target.
So it really puts patients into buckets of urgent now versus I can wait on this. I have to watch this patient very closely. Right? Because as you know, I told you so many patients who have pancreatic cancer will develop diabetes. So this is the highest risk patient population among all cancer diagnosis is that is going to get diabetes.
Right? So we figure that out and we put patients in buckets and then we say, okay, what is the best treatment? And there is a special category for diabetes from pancreatic cancer. It's called type 3c diabetes. It's not type 1, it's not type 2.
Type 1 is autoimmune destruction of cells that manufacture insulin. And type 2 is what most majority people in this world have, which is insulin resistance. You make a ton of insulin and it doesn't work. So I want people, folks to understand who are listening to this that you have a different kind of diabetes. It's called type 3c, where you don't manufacture insulin and another hormone called glucagon, which makes you very sensitive to both high and low blood sugars.
It's very it's a little different than type 1 diabetes, and it's very different than type 2 diabetes. So don't listen to family, don't listen to anybody else's internet that says that you can treat this by this. If you're having high blood sugars, you have pancreatic cancer, you have diabetes, you should talk to your oncologist about whether or not you need an endocrinologist, whether you're there, are they testing you for this, or do they have enough knowledge to manage this? And if they don't, that is absolutely okay because you do not want me to put in chemotherapy orders. I can do it.
I would do a terrible job at it, and I'm very honest about it. And similarly, oncologists are great at what they do. They may not be very good at managing diabetes. So and it is absolutely fine for them to consult another specialist, and it is okay for you to have multiple different team members because these team members are in it to make sure that you are getting your cancer treatments safely. That is the bottom line.
The goal is never to stop treatments. The goal is that if you have an effective treatment that is working, to make sure that you can continue on those treatments in a safe fashion. And that's where an endocrinologist role is so critical when folks are being managed for both diabetes and pancreatic cancer.
Alisyn Camerota: And so on the doctor side, you have, you know, your team that helps and tries to deal with your fluctuating insulin. What can a patient do? Are there things in terms of diet, nutrition where they can manage these dual diseases?
Dr. Afreen Shariff: Number one is do not listen to anyone who says that you're losing weight and you can eat anything you want. That is the absolute 100% wrong advice when you have diabetes and cancer. Because that's what happens if you don't make insulin and you eat ice cream because your oncologist said, gotta gain weight. So let's eat this. I I can tell you the number of times every week I have to repeat myself to patients, and this is happening at a large academic center.
I can't even imagine what's happening in smaller community centers, right? This is what patients are told, you're losing weight, which is very common in pancreatic cancer because they're just having a lot of diarrhea. They're not absorbing because that's the other role of the pancreas is the enzymes. Right? You don't digest.
You don't absorb. So you're losing nutrients, so you're losing weight as part of what the pancreas does, the other action that the pancreas does. So they're advised to eat whatever you can, you just gotta gain weight. Now, someone with diabetes eats whatever they want, their sugar goes up to 300, 400, how are they gonna feel? They're gonna feel tired.
They're gonna lose weight, a lot of weight. They're gonna wake up multiple times in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, which is usually my question that I ask patients. You don't remember how many times you woke up or went to the bathroom during the day, but I'm certain you will remember how many times you woke up at night to go to the bathroom 'cause people remember those things. And that is a hallmark of diabetes. If someone's waking up multiple times in the night to go urinate, they're losing that sugar through their urine. That's how they're losing calories. That's why they lose weight. That's why they feel tired, because you have lots of sugar in your body, but no insulin to push it into cells to use it up. So your cells are starving while you have tons of sugar going around in your body.
That's the focus. That's what insulin does. Insulin is the key to opening the door so that glucose can enter your brain, enter the lungs, enter the skin, enter your muscles. Muscle is probably one of the places that it does not need insulin, and the brain is the other place that doesn't need insulin, but the rest of your body actually needs insulin to open the keys so glucose can enter. So as counterintuitive as it sounds, if someone with pancreatic cancer diabetes is told to eat whatever they want, that is the wrong advice.
So what should they eat? So we have handouts that we actually give patients, and I will tell you the concept behind what we tell patients, right? And we had to develop this because we saw that this was happening so commonly, that the nutritionists in the cancer center would tell patients to eat whatever they wanted. And we're like, no, no, no, no, that is the wrong advice. This is why their blood sugars are so high.
They should be eating. Now the goal is not to starve. K? The bottom line is we do not want patients to starve. The bottom line is that we want you to eat, but we want you to eat diabetes-friendly or healthy diets.
Right? And what I mean from that is healthy is relative to what you have. What's healthy for heart disease is not healthy for diabetes. Okay?
Cereal is advertised as heart healthy. It is terrible for diabetes. Oatmeal is advertised as heart healthy. It is terrible for your diabetes. So that is what you need to know is what is relative to what you have. Kidney disease, people need to eat differently.
Heart disease, you eat differently. Diabetes, you eat differently. The goal is that you'll reduce the amount of carbs and increase the amount of protein, fat, and fiber within your diet. So you have the size of your plate remains the same, so you're not gonna starve. I promise you.
But you're gonna reduce the pasta content, and you're gonna increase the chicken, for example, or the fish, for example, or you're gonna increase the vegetables, for example. Right? And you don't wanna layer your carbs in the sense you don't wanna have a meal where you have pasta, you have a brownie, you have some bread along with it, and you want a soda or sweet tea with it. That is damage to your pancreas. The pancreas is going to beg you to stop doing that if you did that.
We just can't hear the pancreatic language, unfortunately, but it shows up in the form of high blood sugars. So the goal is not to starve, number one, not to lose weight. You eat in a healthy way that works with your diabetes and not something that is a blanket, something you found on the internet, or it says on the box that says healthy. Don't follow that. You have to read labels.
You have to look at the carbs, not just sugars. Carbs raise blood sugar. So carbs is not your best friend when you have diabetes. And when you have pancreatic cancer kind of diabetes, which is a type 3c, you are extremely sensitive to, food and the blood sugars when they go up post meals. So that is something you have to keep in mind.
Alisyn Camerota: What warning signs should people look for, should patients look for that indicate that they're not managing their diabetes well?
Dr. Afreen Shariff: Yeah. So if they have number one thing is fatigue, now everyone writes it off. Fatigue is like white noise in an oncology clinic. Everyone has fatigue, the patients have fatigue, the staff has fatigue, the doctors have fatigue, everyone has fatigue, right? So it is a common denominator, and everyone's fatigue is written off saying that this is because of your cancer.
You are expected to be tired. You're going through a lot, and you're gonna be tired. But the degrees of fatigue matter. If someone is sleeping 12 hours a day and they'd rather pee in the bed than go to the bathroom kind of fatigue, that's the kind of fatigue you experience with diabetes. Now fatigue with what else?
Right? So fatigue is going to be there, but fatigue with increased urination, fatigue with weight loss, fatigue with increased thirst, fatigue with blurry vision. Right? Those and then someone who has pancreatic cancer, 100 percent should be thinking of diabetes. So that is the fatigue with what else is what defines what the fatigue is coming from.
So fatigue is a common thing, but don't ignore fatigue. Don't let anybody tell you to ignore fatigue. Alright? Just because people have it with cancer does not mean everyone's fatigue is the same. So that's where the devil's in the details and trying if someone asks you more beyond someone should be asking you, tell me fatigue.
When did it start? Have you been tired all through your cancer treatments, or did it change in the last two weeks? Did it change in the last month? And someone's looking at your blood sugars on the other side and they're seeing that the blood sugars have trended up. Remember, every time you get your chemotherapy treatments, your oncology team is always getting labs.
They have to get labs to make sure it is safe for them to give the treatment. So you will get labs before every treatment. So you have a tremendous number of data points. Every two weeks, you're getting these numbers. You have blood sugars as part of those numbers.
So if you are seeing that your trends are going up and you're hitting 200, 250 on that number with your blood sugars, you should be pausing and asking your oncologist and saying that, have you looked into diabetes? I'm feeling fatigued. Are you sure this is not coming from my diabetes or my undiagnosed diabetes even because oftentimes it is not even diagnosed?
Alisyn Camerota: So that's the big red flag, the fatigue. Anything else that should tip people off?
Dr. Afreen Shariff: I think the fatigue with the above, patients are very, everyone, every human being is different, right? If we were the same medicine, might as well be just a science, and it's not. It's an it's an art. And this is the reason why. Because if someone says fatigue, I don't stop right there.
I'm always asking, okay. Tell me more. Define your fatigue. How bad is it? What's the worst time of your day?
A good question is how many hours are you sleeping in a day? Do you nap during the day to catch up because you have disturbed sleep? Are you, are you having blurry vision? That is new. Right?
So these are the kind of questions that should come up when someone says fatigue. Oftentimes the conversation about increased urination just does not organically happen. It's not a common question that is asked in an oncology visit. Fatigue is asked, yes. Functional status is asked.
Pain is asked. So people with increased hyperglycemia also report more pain. So they're all interconnected. As I mentioned, the body doesn't work in a silo. They're all talking to each other.
Alisyn Camerota: Okay, so what else can patients do to manage these dual diagnoses?
Dr. Afreen Shariff: Number one is the best tool that I think is you don't know what you don't know until it gets bad with diabetes. So a lot of people can live with blood sugars in the 200s, 300s. And if it comes on slowly, a lot of people get used to it because they reduce the amount of work that they do or they sleep more or they rest more. So they compensate to a significant degree. So they are not they don't know how bad they feel until they feel better.
So symptoms, even though the [inaudible] stuff that I mentioned, it it is very obvious when they're very bad. But in the middle part of things where things are developing and, know, the blood sugar is in the 250s, close to 300s, a lot of patients don't feel significantly worse. They just feel bad. They just feel like, I don't feel right. Right?
So relying on symptoms is probably not the best tool, especially when you're dealing with cancer because there's way too many variables there. Right? The waters are muddy. You got cancer. You got chemotherapy.
You got post chemotherapy side effects. You have other side effects from your chemotherapy, plus you could have diabetes. Right? So relying on symptoms is not the best way. Looking at data, and endocrinology is a very data driven specialty.
You can quack like a duck, you can walk like a duck, the numbers tell me you're not a duck, you're not a duck. And that's how we work in endocrinology. It's all about numbers. It's all about what is the signature that the body is telling us in the form of lab imaging, etcetera. Right?
So we don't rely on just symptoms because everything can be a symptom in endocrinology. That's why numbers are so important for us. So look at your chemistry, which will say, “What is your blood sugar?” Every time you're getting your cancer treatments, look at those numbers. If they are above 250, they should not be ignored.
No matter whether you ate a pancake, whether you had a soda, whether you had a milkshake, does not matter. 250 and above, you should be talking to your oncologist about it. Right? And anything above 200 random blood sugar is considered diabetes, by the way. But I'm saying, when do you call somebody up about this?
Right? So 250 and above, inform your oncologist so that they're paying attention to this, number one. Number two, there are over the counter, continuous glucose monitors, which are called Stelo and Lingo. You do not need a prescription for this. You can go and pick up just like you pick up diabetes supplies in the aisle where cough and cold medications are.
You should be able to purchase this, and they're usually less than a $100 for a month's supply. Again, the cost might come down. Again, it's not for everyone. Right? But if people are really interested in learning about their blood sugars, you don't need to go to a doctor for this.
You can go pick it up at the pharmacy, start wearing it. Most people are able to follow YouTube videos or the handout that they give within the box. It's pretty fairly intuitive to follow and can get started in using it. And when you hit those numbers, 250 above, you should be talking to somebody about it. 200, you should start worrying about it.
250 and above, you should be telling somebody about it, before it gets to their high levels. Right? And especially post steroids is the time to actually watch your blood sugars because that's really where the damage happens. And folks are feeling poorly, and it's written off that this is your chemotherapy. But if your blood sugars are controlled, you can actually fix that part of your fatigue and that part of you, I'm not feeling good, that is coming from the high blood sugars if you can fix that.
So that is a modifiable problem. It does not have to exist if you don't fix it. So that's something I'm going to underscore.
Alisyn Camerota: Yes, such good information. Okay. So what have we missed? What else should people know?
Dr. Afreen Shariff: I think when I'm thinking about this, talk about it. Talk about this to your oncologist when you get diagnosed. If folks are listening and you're new to a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer or you've had it for a while, right? I think it's important to have this conversation with your oncologist. You need to talk about the fact that someone is treating a cancer within your pancreas.
Do you have diabetes? Should you be looking for something? Is this a good time for you to see an endocrinologist? Is it too early? Are there things I can do?
Exercise is always a great tool. Right? Because as I mentioned earlier, blood sugars can enter two parts of your body without insulin. One is your muscle, the other one's your brain. You can flex your brain muscles, but you can certainly flex your your other muscles to to soak up some of the glucose.
So that's a great tool to get your blood sugars down. But it only works to some extent if you're not making insulin, because if you're deficient in insulin, it's not going to fix the problem. It's only going to assist with lowering your blood sugars to some extent. So that's an important distinction to know. There's no natural herbs.
There's no natural supplements that you can do to to replace what your body naturally makes, which is a very critical hormone. So I want to make sure people are aware that to be very of, of things that are marketed as the solution. First of all, figure out what is the problem. Get a diagnosis, right? I think once you know what the problem is, then you understand or someone can assist you with what should be the right treatment.
And if you have the right diagnosis and you truly have insulin deficiency, which is type 3c diabetes, the treatment is insulin. There's nothing else in this planet that can replace insulin that your body manufactures. I want to make sure that people are not steered in the wrong direction. First, get the right diagnosis, right? Diagnosis is important.
If you have that, then that is the right treatment. If you don't have that, then there's other things, right? That is a different discussion. But I want people to know that, this is an important conversation to have at any point in your lifespan of pancreatic cancer.
Alisyn Camerota: So helpful. I think you've given people really great tips. Dr. Afreen Shariff, thank you very much for being on PancChat.
Dr. Afreen Shariff: Of course, and thank you for having me on the podcast. This is obviously a great medium and it reaches a lot of people. So I hope people can benefit from this, learn from this, and educate each other. I think each one to each one is such an important way of disseminating information across the world.
Alisyn Camerota: I know they can. I too hear the feedback. People do get a lot out of these conversations. So thank you so much for being a part of it. Thanks to our listeners for tuning in. I'm Alisyn Camerota, your host, and I'll see you next time.
Cindy Gavin: Thank you, Dr. Shariff and Alisyn, for that informative discussion. I'm Cindy Gavin, CEO and Co-Founder of Let's Win. If you or a loved one has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, navigating this journey can be extremely overwhelming. But you don't have to do it alone.
Be sure to explore the many resources available for patients and caregivers through Let's Win and PanCAN. PanCAN can be found at pancan.org and Let's Win at letswinpc.org. Our sites continuously post the latest news about diet, nutrition, and treatment for people with both diabetes and pancreatic cancer. And you can find links to these sections in the podcast notes. Together, Let's Win and PanCAN are committed to guiding you through every step of the pancreatic cancer journey, offering hope, support, and information.
In our next episode, we will be learning more about KRAS. Please follow PancChat to get your episodes delivered twice a month in your podcast feed. PancChat is available on all major platforms wherever you get your podcasts. See you next month