Circulating tumor cells in pancreatic cancer patients: efficacy in diagnosis and value in prognosis.

Detection of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) has become widely used as a liquid biopsy for many patients. In pancreatic cancer patients, there have been a number of published reports on the efficacy of CTCs in the diagnosis and prognosis of pancreatic cancer, and in the evaluation of response to treatment. We systematically reviewed the diagnosis efficiency and prognostic value of CTCs reported in the literature. We found that the frequency of CTCs is rare, limited to a certain degree by the current enrichment and detection methodologies. The sensitivity of CTCs for diagnosis is variable likely due to the different stages of the disease at the time of diagnosis (varied from 25.0% to 100.0%) but specificity remained relatively high (varied from 99.7% to 100.0%). However, pooled results from meta-analyses (patients with CTC positivity had worse overall survival than patients with CTC negativity) demonstrated that CTCs could be used as an effective tool in the prognosis prediction in pancreatic cancer patients.