For years, heavy drinking was believed to be one of the main factors that led to pancreatitis, but after a 12-year study at the University of Pittsburgh, doctors have found a few genes that are the culprits in some cases.
Most heavy drinkers never pancreatitis, but many who don’t drink heavily are affected. The research found that genes determine if the pancreas will be susceptible to drinking, smoking and abnormal processes.
Researchers found that patients that carried a variant of a gene called CTRC could develop pancreatitis with only a few drinks a day. They also found this variant could cause the same sensitivity through smoking.
“Some people have a very sensitive pancreas because their genetics aren’t quite right, and it makes them likely to have this inflammation and destruction. We can pinpoint who is going to have this kind of problem very early in the course, so that there are things that we can do to help minimize the problem,” said senior investigator, David Whitcomb, chief of gastroenterology, hepatology, and nutrition at Pitt School of Medicine.
They discovered that a variant of the gene can cause the pancreas’s digestive enzyme, trypsin which breaks down meat, to prematurely activate in the pancreas causing it to digest itself.
Whitcomb said that pancreatitis affects about 200,000 people annually, and of that a third of those people will have recurring problems, and of those another third will have completely destroyed pancreases.
Before pancreatitis was only diagnosed once there was irreversible damage, and according to Whitcomb it was hard to detect the disease rather than just treat the symptoms such as abdominal pain and diabetes.
“So it really moved the diagnosis forward by maybe 5-10 years, so it gives us a hint on why there’s a problem and maybe there are some things that we can do that will help protect that person so that they never develop a disease for which there is no cure,” said Whitcomb.
