Pancreatic cancer with multiple cutaneous metastases and pancreatitis as first manifestations: a case report

Abstract

Pancreatic cancer has an insidious onset and a high degree of malignancy, which has the characteristics of difficult early diagnosis, low surgical resection rate, unsatisfactory drug treatment effect and poor prognosis, and most of the patients have already undergone distant metastasis and lost the chance of surgery. A small number of patients start with acute pancreatitis, which is easy to be misdiagnosed by the clinic. In addition, the common sites of distant metastasis of advanced pancreatic cancer are the liver, peritoneum and lungs. Cutaneous metastasis is rare, but in rare cases, it is the only external manifestation of pancreatic cancer. Up to now, about 60 cases of cutaneous metastasis of pancreatic cancer with complete clinical data have been reported in the literature, all of which suggest a poor prognosis. In this case, we present a patient of pancreatic cancer with multiple cutaneous metastases and acute pancreatitis as the first manifestation, and the patient died one month after diagnosis due to the rapid progression of the disease. Clinical awareness and attention to early diagnosis of pancreatic cancer and cutaneous metastases still need to be improved, and positive and timely pathological diagnosis and genetic testing are particularly important to guide treatment and improve the prognosis.