pancreatic cancer patients who are given a combination of chemotherapy drugs survive longer than those prescribed a single treatment, Italian researchers said on Tuesday.

The disease, the 14th most common cancer worldwide, has a poor survival rate because the illness is usually only detected in its later stages. Most patients die within a year of being diagnosed.

But scientists at the San Raffaele H Scientific Institute in Milan found that twice as many patients who were given combined chemotherapy known as PEGF in a study had survived a year compared to people taking just one drug.

“We have shown that patients allocated PEGF had a more favourable outcome in terms of progression-free survival and overall survival than did those allocated standard treatment with gemcitabine,” said Dr Michele Reni, who conducted the trial.

Gemcitabine is the standard treatment for the illness.

Each year approximately 216,000 new cases of pancreatic cancer are diagnosed and 213,000 die from the illness, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in France.

There is no effective screening programme for the illness, most cases of which occur in developed countries. In about 10 percent cases there is a genetic component. Smoking is one of the main risk factors for the illness.

The researchers compared the two types of treatments on 104 patients, aged 18-70. Fifty-two patients were given the combined treatment of cisplatin, epirubicin, gemcitabine and fluorouracil (PEGF) and 47 received just gemcitabine.

Four months after the study began, 60 percent in the PEGF group were alive, compared to 28 percent taking the single drug. Forty percent on combined treatment were alive after a one-year follow-up but the number dropped to 20 percent in the gemcitabine group.

Reni said the findings, which are reported in The Lancet Oncology, are important because combination therapy had manageable side effects which did not affect the quality of patients’ lives.

Pancreatic cancer is rarely diagnosed in its early stages because symptoms such as unexplained weight loss, nausea, diarrhoea, weakness, jaundice and back pain only occur when the illness is more advanced.