Acute pancreatitis in children and adolescents

In this Topic Highlight, the causes, diagnosis, and treat-ment of acute pancreatitis in children are discussed. Acute pancreatitis should be considered during the dif-ferential diagnosis of abdominal pain in children and requires prompt treatment because it may become life-threatening. The etiology, clinical manifestations, and course of acute pancreatitis in children are often differ-ent than in adults. Therefore, the specific features of acute pancreatitis in children must be considered. The etiology of acute pancreatitis in children is often drugs, infections, trauma, or anatomic abnormalities. Diagnosis is based on clinical symptoms(such as abdominal pain and vomiting), serum pancreatic enzyme levels, and im-aging studies. Several scoring systems have been pro-posed for the assessment of severity, which is useful for selecting treatments and predicting prognosis. The basic pathogenesis of acute pancreatitis does not greatly dif-fer between adults and children, and the treatments for adults and children are similar. In large part, our under-standing of the pathology, optimal treatment, assess-ment of severity, and outcome of acute pancreatitis in children is taken from the adult literature. However, we often find that the common management of adult pan-creatitis is difficult to apply to children. With advances in diagnostic techniques and treatment methods, severeacute pancreatitis in children is becoming better under-stood and more controllable.