Can early diagnosis of EUS-FNA needle tract seeding for pancreatic cancer improve patient prognosis?

Endoscopic ultrasound-guided fine needle aspiration (EUS-FNA) is useful in differentiating pancreatic cancer from other pancreatic diseases and allows the collection of histopathological evidence before surgical resection or chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer. Numerous studies have investigated the diagnostic performance of EUS-FNA in pancreatic cancer. A systematic review by Chen et al. demonstrated the high diagnostic performance of EUS-FNA based on a sensitivity of 92% (95% confidence interval [CI] 91-93) and a specificity of 96% (95% CI 93-98)1 . In a multicenter prospective study of 246 patients with pancreatic tumors, Yoshinaga et al. found that the sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, positive predictive value, and negative predictive value of EUS-FNA were 97.2%, 88%, 96.2%, 100%, and 81.4%, respectively.