Autoimmune pancreatitis. Diabetes

[Guest guest]

Fliss,

I am glad to hear you found some more definite answers. I hope your husband

is doing better. And as far as your US girl, there is a song that say,

Carolina girls, best in the world! LOL! I am a little prejudice though since I

am

one! LOL!

Take care,

Angie in SC

" The happiest of people don't necessarily have the

best of everything; they just make the best of everything that comes along

their way. "

[Guest guest]

Hi everyone,

I had an appt with one of the Profs on Wed and he said my tests for

antibodies were negative so it doesn't look as though I have

autoimmune pancreatitis. They were 99.9% certain it was hereditary

pancreatitis anyway.

It appears that the Europac study (on hereditary diseases of the

pancreas) now has some evidence that the high threat of panc cancer,

which classic hereditary pancreatitis sometimes represents for

sufferers, is higher where there is diabetes as well as

calcifications. I have extensive calcifications but am not yet

diabetic, as far as I know.I have very regular glucose tolerance tests

to catch the diabetes as early as possible. This will enable me to

reassess the TP as a viable option. Once the insulin production has

stopped and the patient is already diabetic, it is considered that

there is less to lose, as it were, by having a TP. (The ICT is not

routinely done in the UK although there have been one or two centres

which have tried it. It isn't done in Liverpool, where I am a patient,

although the pancreatic centre is considered a leading one. I'm not

quite sure why this is the case. I think sometimes, by the time the

pancreas is so diseased as to to merit TP consideration, there aren't

enough insulin cells to transplant into the liver anyway. I know

that's why some of you Americans advocate looking at the TP as an

earlier option while there are still plenty of cells left.)

I'm having another EUS soon. As some of you know, I am on the very

close monitoring programme, the aim of which is to check for panc

cancer-development just as early as possible. This is research at

Liverpool. I can't have an ERCP (with pancreatic juice collection and

analysis for cell mutations indication possible pre-cancerous changes)

more frequently than every three years. CT scans are also carefully

spaced out. However, the EUS is administered to patients on this

programme once a year. The ERCP is seen as more risky, obviously.

(Personally I found my last one just fine, despite slightly increased

pain for a few days afterwards.)

Finishing school next Wednesday, which will give me more time to spend

on the board. We've had something on....concerts, sports

etc......every evening for over a week now! We had a little girl

visiting from the US, Carolina, I think, on our sports day. Our kids

loved her and her gorgeous accent!

Heat pretty awful here in the UK at the moment......but I suppose it's

nothing to what you across the pond are used to!

With warmest (Ha!Ha!) wishes to everyone and the hope of pain-free

times for my American e-friends,

Fliss (UK)