Encyclopedia > Pancreatitis

  Article Content

Pancreatitis

Acute Pancreatitis

Features

  • Severe abdominal pain often radiating through to the back.
  • Nausea, vomiting and loss of appetite.
  • Severe illness, sometimes requiring admission to intensive care and sometimes fatal.
  • Recovery may be followed by development of pancreatic pseudocyst, pancreatic dysfunction (malabsorption) and diabetes.

Causes

  • Gallstones
  • Alcohol
  • Mumps
  • Hypercalcaemia
  • Idiopathic (unknown)
  • Fat necrosis

Gallstones and alcohol abuse account, in Western countries, for more than 90% of all acute pancreatitis. Gallstones that travel down the common bile duct and which subsequently get stuck in the Ampulla of Vater[?] can cause obstruction in the outflow of pancreatic juices from the pancreas into the duodenum. The backflow of these digestive juices causes lysis[?] of pancreatic cells and subsequent pancreatitis.

Pathogenesis The exocrine pancreas produces a variety of enzymes that breakdown food tissues, such as proteases, lipases and saccharidases. Basically these spill into the blood and digest the patients own tissues.

Diagnosis

  • Blood tests (amylase or lipase[?]).
  • Xrays (plain Xrays help exclude other causes, CT scan may be useful).

Treatment

  • Supportive for shock.
  • Pain relief
  • Enzyme inhibitors are not proven to work.
  • While often severe, the disease is essentially self limiting.



All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

 
  Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!
 
 
  
  Featured Article
French resistance

... military wing of Front National (see below). Franc-Tireur[?] Left-wing group formed by Jean-Pierre Lévy[?] in Lyon in 1941. In December 1941 they began to publish Le ...

 
 
 
This page was created in 40.1 ms