@californiazebra , those are good points.

In an email I received today from PanCan, there was a link to this article about full-body MRI scans: https://pancan.org/news/full-body-mri-what-you-need-to-know/
but the more interesting link was in last sentence of the article:

"The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force currently recommends against screening for pancreatic cancer in asymptomatic adults not known to be at high risk for the disease." https://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/uspstf/recommendation/pancreatic-cancer-screening

There is a ton of good data if you have time to open and read all of those links. They include discussion of some of the risks of overscreening and invasive screening, particularly in exchange for the statistical benefit obtained.

They do make the point in that report that it applies to the non-symptomatic population of people not known to be at risk, and that high-risk people (genetic conditions or first-degree relatives with PC) are excluded from the general recommendation.

I was disappointed to not find in those reports any updated info about the predictive value of CA19-9, CEA, DNA-based blood tests, or sudden-onset diabetes. They all have their limitations, but are all "yellow flags" that (IMHO) justify a deeper dive. Study conclusions are always based on statistics, but if you're an outlier patient on the bad extreme of their curves, it can be disastrous to be overlooked because you didn't fall closer to the center of the study population.

The linked task force recommendations obviously took several years to produce, and could only look at data produced several years prior. Unfortunately, that's part of the reason medical advances are so slow to roll out. I think/hope that by the time the next one comes out, it will use artificial intelligence to include a lot more input data and tease out new true-positive cases that human minds didn't think to look for.