Something new in the management of acute pancreatitis: brief review of recent guidelines and practical tips

Abstract

Improvement in diagnostic and therapeutic techniques has led to revision of past guidelines on the management of acute pancreatitis (AP), still not uniformly applied on the territory, partly due to the different distribution of resources to the various centers, partly due to the lack of unequivocal conduct in the approach itself. We had tried to outline most important changes emerged from the revision of recent and authoritative guidelines, focusing on what we believe are still critical points and identifying attitudes more equally shared than others. Based also on the experience of our small center, which however manages numerous cases of AP and their complications, we finally proposed a simple decision algorithm, which does not claim to be a codified recommendation, but only a small and concrete suggestion.