How Early Detection Helped Maria Menounos Against Pancreatic Cancer

You may not care if the early bird gets the worm, if you happen to not like worms. But early detection of cancer will get you something you should definitely want: much higher chances of successful treatment. That’s what happened to Emmy Award-winning TV host, author and podcaster Maria Menounos when the neuroendocrine cancer that she had in her pancreas was detected before it could spread any further. You could say that harrowing experience has pan-created motivation for Menounos to team up with Exact Sciences—the makers of a multi-cancer screening blood test called Cancerguard— to advocate for more cancer screening. I recently talked to Menounous, who’s been a host of Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, and E! News and a reporter for The Today Show, about all this and more.

Menounos Had A Meningioma Removed In 2017

Part of the more is that Menounos has now seen cancer from different perspectives. In 2016, her mother, Litsa Menounos, was diagnosed with a malignant and very difficult to treat type of brain cancer known as glioblastoma multiforme, which originates from the glial cells of the brain. As she cared for her mother going through radiation and chemotherapy treatments, Menounos started experiencing brain-ish symptoms herself: intense ear pain, headaches, dizziness and slurred speech. Her doctor ordered an MRI of the brain, but Menounos, given her busy TV schedule including serving as the co-anchor of E! News, postponed getting it. But that led to even more EEEE! news—she began having blurry vision. That prompted her to clearly see the need to get the MRI, which she finally did at 10:30 pm on a Friday at UCLA Medical Center, because what else are you going to do on a Friday night.

The MRI revealed a meningioma about the size of a golf-ball. So both she and her mother had brain tumors, which was kind of WTF coincidence. But their tumors were different. A meningioma is a growth from the meninges, membranes that wrap around your brain like Saran Wrap around a fruitcake. And unlike GBMs, menigiomas are typically benign since they tend to be so slow growing.

However, that doesn’t mean you can just ignore it like a bad mullet (as opposed to a good mullet). Depending on its location and where it grows, a meningioma can press upon vital structures in the brain and cause all sorts of problems. She eventually underwent surgery to remove the meningioma and for a while had to deal with the after effects of the surgery. The whole experience taught Menounous to be pay more attention to her health.

Menounos Began Experiencing Unexplained Symptoms In 2022

Fast forward to 2022 when she started experiencing bloating and substantial pain in the left upper quadrant of her abdomen. “I remember like all of 2022 trying to figure out what was going on,” she recalled. “I was taking photos in the mirror. I had this big, like, where is this coming from?”

She continued by saying, “So I went to the doctor, then we did additional tests like endoscopy and colonoscopy, but nothing was coming back to explain these pains. And then the pains got worse, they got really, really bad, and then I got a CT scan and that said, I was clear, too.”

But it still wasn’t clear what was causing these symptoms. “It wasn’t until I basically took matters into my own hands and did some additional screening that I found this rare form of pancreatic cancer,” she explained. A full body MRI in 2023 revealed cancer in her pancreas.

Menounos Had A Rare Type Of Pancreatic Cancer

Her mother had recently passed away from the brain cancer and now Menounos thought she herself was a “goner.” She had heard that people don’t tend to survive too long after getting diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. But rather than the more common adenocarcinoma of the pancreas that arise from the cells lining the pancreatic ducts this was a neuroendocrine cancer arising from the hormone-producing cells of the pancreas. Plus, it was still at stage 2, meaning that it hadn’t yet spread to the lymph nodes and beyond. That made it more likely to be completely removed by surgery.

When it comes to surgery, the joke is that the only minor surgery for you is when it is on someone else. But surgery for pancreatic cancer is especially major and grueling. The pancreas is tucked deep among various vital structures in your abdomen. So, cutting out part of pancreas involves rearranging things in there. The surgery did manage to get the mass out along with her surrounding lymph nodes and spleen as well as a big ol’ fibroid. “Fortunately, they found that the tumor was still confined within the pancreas,” she told me. “They had like removed 17 lymph nodes. It was a long surgery.” In this case, long meant around 10 hours, which is longer than it would take to watch the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy.

For Menounos, Early Detection Was Key

What was even longer was recovery from the surgery. “Yeah, it took a minute,” she remarked tongue-in-cheek figuratively and not literally. “I was lucky that they got it all out and it hadn’t spread anywhere.” As a result, Menounos was able to welcome along with her husband Keven Undergaro the arrival of their daughter Athena via a surrogate that year. Menounos had to recover from the grueling surgery, which ain’t easy, and she has to continue to go through regular testing to make sure things are OK. You could say that Menounos—who has also made various appearance with World Wrestling Entertainment, co-hosting WWE Raw and even getting into the ring herself— has certainly wrestled with some major health issues over the past decade. Nonetheless, she said, “I’m really blessed because if I hadn’t gone through the additional screenings, I might not be here right now.”

Menounos Hosts The Heal Squad Podcast

All of these experiences made it natural for her to do two things. One is to host a podcast called Heal Squad. This is where she discusses her and others’ health journeys and helps people how to advocate for themselves through this Jumanji-esque jungle known as the U.S. healthcare system. “Even with really well-intentioned doctors, the system is set up, unfortunately, to help you when you’re already sick,” she lamented. “They’re not set up to really really be preventative, and this is why I’m so passionate about teaching people to be the CEO of their health and to take control of their health, because you have to be the one that’s doing the preventative measures with your diet, with your sleep habits, with your circadian function habits, with everything, and then especially with expanded screenings.”

Menounos Is Working With Exact Sciences

The other thing she has done is to connect with Exact Sciences to advocate for expanded cancer screening, because in here words, “70% of annual cancers and deaths in this country don’t have any routine recommended cancer screenings, and so things like pancreatic cancer, or lung cancer, esophageal, stomach cancer, these have the highest morbidity risks and are the most deadliest cancers, and we haven’t have any regular screenings for them.” I’ve written before in Forbes about how Exact Sciences makes Cologuard, a test used to screen your poop for colon cancer. But in the end, that’s not all that Exact Sciences does. At the beginning of this article, I mentioned that the company also makes Cancerguard, a blood test that can be used to screen for the presence of biomarkers associated with over 50 different types and subtypes of cancer. Included in this 50 are many cancers for which there aren’t currently other types of routine screening methods like liver, pancreatic, ovarian, gastric and esophageal cancer.

The test certainly isn’t perfect. It has an overall sensitivity of around 64%, which means that if you have one of the 50 cancers it will pick it up 64% of the time, as reported by Angus Chen for STAT News. However, this sensitivity does fall down to 39% when focusing on earlier stage—like stage 1 or 2—cancers. Of course, 39% still is a lot better than 0%, which may your chance of detecting cancers deep in your body like pancreatic cancer in their early stages when you don’t do any type of routine screening for them.

For years, there have been traditional and widely used routine screening methods for only a limited number of cancer—namely breast, prostate, skin, colon and lung. Having multi-cancer early detection tests like Cancerguard and Grail’s Galleri test now on the market could help significantly expand what cancers you are trying to catch early on before they’s spread too far. It is still early days for such tests so we’ll have to see how widely available and accepted they become and how such tests perform over the long run. But you don’t have to look too hard to see the many clear benefits of being able to detect cancer early.