Continuous Glucose Monitoring After Pancreas Surgery (CGMAPS).
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Continuous Glucose Monitoring in the Perioperative Care and Long-Term Follow-up of Patients undergoing Pancreas Resection for Cancer.
IRAS ID
355120
Contact name
Peter Szatmary
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Liverpool University Hospitals NHS FT
Duration of Study in the UK
3 years, 0 months, 4 days
Research summary
Diabetes and pancreatic cancer have an interesting and complicated relationship. Risk factors such as obesity increase the likelihood of developing both diabetes and pancreatic cancer. Diabetes itself further increases the risk of developing pancreatic cancer. Increasingly it is becoming apparent that pancreatic cancer can also lead to diabetes, either directly through substances released by the tumour or by causing scarring of the remaining pancreas. This means that over half of patients who have surgery for pancreatic cancer have undiagnosed diabetes which often does not become apparent until patients are prepared for surgery.
Managing diabetes or prediabetes well improves outcomes after cancer surgery in stomach, bowel and liver cancer as well as after heart surgery. Pancreas surgery has always been excluded from these studies, as there is an additional unknown when part of the insulin producing cells are removed as part of the cancer surgery. Pancreas surgery itself carries a risk of resulting diabetes, but we have limited understanding which patients are most at risk of this.
This study will look at the impact pancreas cancer and pancreas surgery have on blood sugar control in both diabetic and non-diabetic patients. Patients having surgery for pancreas cancer treatment will be offered a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) worn as a plaster to the upper arm which records blood sugar estimates on a continuous basis 2 weeks before and up to 1 year after their surgery. We will take blood samples and ask patients to complete quality of life questionnaires before and after their operation. In this way, we aim to find factors that predict the development of diabetes, whether worse blood sugar control is linked with worse outcomes or quality of life and whether long-term measurement of blood sugar is useful in predicting tolerance of chemotherapy and/or early cancer recurrence.
REC name
North West - Greater Manchester Central Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
26/NW/0119
Date of REC Opinion
6 May 2026
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion