Several studies have shown that there is a relationship between pancreatic cancer and the overexpression of survivin in tumor tissues[37,42–45]; however, few studies have investigated the association between the serum survivin level and prognosis in pancreatic cancer.[26,42,43,46–48] Previous studies investigating serum survivin levels have focused mostly on comparing the survivin level between patients and healthy individuals, similar to our report. Here, BIRC5 is linked to familial pancreatic carcinoma.