Updates in the Management of Acute Pancreatitis

This chapter reviews the current state of the art of clinical management in acute pancreatitis, a disease that continues to be a leading gastrointestinal cause of hospitalization and severe morbidity and mortality. For most of the cases, a self-limiting illness, acute pancreatitis is for a minority of patients a life-threatening condition, associated with elevated morbidity and mortality, mainly driven by organ failure and infectious complications, despite improvements in access to centers of expertise, imaging, and interventional techniques and the availability of clinical practice guidelines. In the modern era, early triage, improvements in intensive care management, nutritional support, and timely and appropriate intervention for local complications with less invasive approaches represent the cornerstones of the treatment. The current guidelines, recent literature, and up-to-date interventional techniques are here reviewed and discussed.