Pancreatic incidentalomas: high rate of potentially malignant tumors.

Background: Pancreatic incidentaloma (PI) is an increasingly common diagnosis that has received little attention. We characterized these tumors and compared them with symptomatic pancreatic tumors (nonincidentaloma [NI]).

Study Design: A retrospective database of 475 consecutive pancreatectomies that were performed from January 1995 to June 2007 at our institution was analyzed.