What are the eight causes of acute pancreatitis?

As people's quality of life continues to improve, inflammation such as acute pancreatitis is more common than in the past. Since its symptoms are mostly abdominal pain, nausea, and vomiting, patients can easily mistake it for gastrointestinal discomfort or fever, thus delaying the golden period of treatment. Acute pancreatitis should receive widespread attention from all sectors of society due to its high mortality rate and severe symptoms. To understand acute pancreatitis, we should start with its causes.

1. Biliary tract diseases, such as bile duct stones, cholangitis, biliary ascariasis, etc. The incidence rate is about 56%, especially cholelithiasis is the most common. Recent studies have found that about 2/3 to 3/4 of patients with acute pancreatitis are caused by tiny gallstones in the bile duct. However, these gallstones are often difficult to detect in routine B-ultrasound and CT examinations.

2. Alcoholism and overeating. In clinical practice, it is common to see patients who develop pancreatitis due to overeating and drinking excessively after reunions with family or friends. The reason is that overeating or drinking a lot of alcohol often leads to excessive pancreatic secretion, duodenal papillary edema and Oddi sphincter spasm, increased pancreatic duct pressure, pancreatic juice excretion disorder, pancreatic acinar rupture, and pancreatic juice overflow, causing acute pancreatic edema and necrosis.

3. Surgery and trauma, blunt abdominal trauma, abdominal surgery, especially surgery on the stomach, bile duct and adjacent pancreatic organs, may directly damage the pancreas or affect the blood supply to the pancreas.

4. Retrograde pancreatic cholangiopancreatography examination may also cause complications of acute pancreatitis due to excessive injection pressure or repeated injection. Due to the improvement of operating techniques and equipment in recent years, the incidence rate has been greatly reduced.

5. Certain infectious diseases can also cause acute pancreatitis. Such as mumps, infectious mononucleosis, Coxsackie virus, Echo virus, Mycoplasma pneumoniae, and bacteria such as Yersinia, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, Salmonella, Streptococcus, etc., but most of the conditions are mild and can be relieved on their own as the infection heals.

6. Certain drugs: such as thiazide diuretics, azathioprine, corticosteroids, tetracycline, sulfonamides, etc. can induce acute pancreatitis.

7. Certain metabolic factors can also cause acute pancreatitis. Acute pancreatitis can also be caused by hyperlipidemia, hyperparathyroidism, kidney or heart transplantation, certain vascular diseases and genetic factors, but they are relatively rare.

8. In addition, 5-7% of patients have unknown causes. The clinical manifestations are persistent knife-like, colic, or stabbing pain in the upper abdomen or the middle part of the upper abdomen, which worsens in paroxysmal manner and radiates to the left front of the waist. The pain is more obvious in the supine position or after eating, and is often accompanied by nausea, vomiting, and fever. It is called idiopathic pancreatitis.