MEDICAL PROGRESS - ACUTE-PANCREATITIS

From mild disease to multiorgan failure and sepsis, acute pancreatitis is a disorder that has numerous causes, an obscure pathogenesis, few effective remedies, and an often unpredictable outcome. In 1925, Moynihan aptly described the dramatic nature of acute pancreatitis as the “most terrible of all calamities that occur in connection with the abdominal viscera. The suddenness of its onset, the illimitable agony which accompanies it, and the mortality attendant upon it render it the most formidable of catastrophes”1. Just over 100 years ago, Reginald Fitz2 described many of the modern clinical and pathologic features of severe acute pancreatitis3. © 1994, Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved.