Pancreatic Disorders News

Limited evidence suggests that early enteral feeding for patients hospitalized with mild-to-moderate acute pancreatitis may reduce length of hospital stay and gastrointestinal symptoms, compared with delayed feeding, according to data published in Annals of Internal Medicine.

Researchers have developed a modified Fistula Risk Score based on data from the American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program, or NSQIP, which can preoperatively predict the risk for anastomotic leak after pancreas resection and help to prevent the development of pancreatic fistula.

In this guest commentary, Andres Gelrud, MD, associate professor of medicine at University of Chicago Medicine, discusses an investigational drug, volanesorsen, that was shown to reduce triglyceride levels in patients with an increased risk for pancreatitis due to familial chylomicronemia syndrome in the phase 3 APPROACH trial.

Researchers observed “unexpectedly high” adherence to guidelines recommending cholecystectomy within 4 weeks for acute biliary pancreatitis, which effectively reduced subsequent hospitalizations.

Endoscopic ultrasound-guided needle-based confocal laser endomicroscopy using the Cellvizio platform characterized pancreatic cysts with high accuracy and “near-perfect” inter- and intraobserver agreement in recent study.

Patients with autoimmune pancreatitis who received maintenance therapy with a low dose of corticosteroids for 3 years showed lower relapse rates and longer relapse-free survival compared with patients who stopped taking corticosteroids at 26 weeks, according to the results of a randomized controlled trial.

The FDA has issued a safety announcement warning that Viberzi should not be used in patients who do not have a gallbladder due to an increased risk for serious pancreatitis.

Light scattering spectroscopy, a novel optical technique based on a spatial gating fiber-optic probe, predicted the malignant potential of pancreatic cysts during routine diagnostic endoscopic ultrasound-guided fine-needle aspiration with significantly higher accuracy than current diagnostics.

Patients with mild acute pancreatitis had more rapid clinical improvement with early aggressive intravenous hydration compared with standard hydration in a randomized trial.

Researchers associated various dietary factors to the risk for acute pancreatitis in a large study cohort representing multiple ethnicities.