Early Prediction of Severity in Acute Pancreatitis Using Infrared Spectroscopy of Serum

The incidence and aetiology of acute pancreatitis across Europe

“…Table 3 shows the three main aetiologies of acute pancreatitis (alcohol, gallstone and other or idiopathic aetiology) reported from studies across Europe. Of 11 studies from eastern Europe, seven (64%) had a higher ratio of alcohol to gallstone aetiologies [10,[24][25][26][27][28]77], which is significantly higher than for two of 16 studies from southern Europe (13%; p=0.012) [8,30], and for three of 21 studies from northern Europe (14%; p=0.013) [29,31], although not significantly different to three of nine studies from western Europe (33%; p=0.37) [28,32].…”

Predicting the Severity of Acute Pancreatitis: Choose the Right Horse Before Hitching the Cart

“…Further, it also only focused on novel (non-routine) molecular markers, which effectively means that many routine markers (urea, creatinine, lactate dehydrogenase, C-reactive protein, hematocrit, blood gases, etc.) as well as several modern computer-based predictive tools in acute pancreatitis (artificial neural network, kernel-based modelling, linear discriminant analysis [4][5][6]) were not counted. Collectively, these indicate that the literature is replete with dozens, if not hundreds, of presumably effective ways to predict the severity of acute pancreatitis, but it appears that very few have entered clinical practice.…”

Therapeutic implications of oxidative stress in acute and chronic pancreatitis

“…The idea that a certain physico-chemical technique may identify changes in blood indicative of its oxidative status is not novel. For example, several years ago we pioneered the use of infrared spectroscopy (which measures the wavelengths of infrared light absorbed by a biological fluid) in patients with acute pancreatitis [23,24]. The authors chose another perspective technique, cyclic voltammetry, which is based on the analysis of the intensity of a current crossing a biological fluid over a wide range of voltages, and demonstrated that the current maxima of the first peak of a cyclic voltagram correlated with the severity of pancreatitis as well as with the concentrations of some antioxidants.…”