Prospective Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2015. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastroenterol. Sep 28, 2015; 21(36): 10427-10434
Published online Sep 28, 2015. doi: 10.3748/wjg.v21.i36.10427
Early endoscopic ultrasonography in acute biliary pancreatitis: A prospective pilot study
Andrea Anderloni, Marianna Galeazzi, Marco Ballarè, Michela Pagliarulo, Marco Orsello, Mario Del Piano, Alessandro Repici
Andrea Anderloni, Alessandro Repici, Digestive Endoscopy Unit, Division of Gastroenterology, Humanitas Research Hospital, Rozzano, 20089 Milan, Italy
Marianna Galeazzi, Marco Ballarè, Michela Pagliarulo, Marco Orsello, Mario Del Piano, Gastrointestinal and Endoscopy Unit, AOU “Maggiore della Carità”, 28100 Novara, Italy
Author contributions: Anderloni A designed the study and actively participated to the execution of the endoscopic procedures; Galeazzi M and Pagliarulo M contributed collecting data and writing the paper; Ballarè M and Orsello M were involved in the endoscopic procedures and in following patients and collecting data; Del Piano M and Repici A contributed to the statistic and reviewed the paper.
Institutional review board statement: The study complied with the ethical guidelines of the 1975 Declaration of Helsinki and was approved by the Institutional Review Board of our hospital.
Clinical trial registration statement: NCT02430285.
Informed consent statement: Written informed consent was obtained from all the patients enrolled.
Conflict-of-interest statement: None declared.
Data sharing statement: Consent for data sharing was not obtained but this was a single centre pilot study and the presented data are anonymized and the risk of identification is low.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Andrea Anderloni, MD, PhD, Digestive Endoscopy Unit, Division of Gastroenterology, Humanitas Research Hospital, Rozzano, 20089 Milan, Italy. andrea.anderloni@humanitas.it
Telephone: +39-2-82242579 Fax: +39-2-82242292
Received: March 9, 2015
Peer-review started: March 10, 2015
First decision: April 1, 2015
Revised: May 12, 2015
Accepted: June 9, 2015
Article in press: June 10, 2015
Published online: September 28, 2015
Processing time: 203 Days and 11.7 Hours
Core Tip

Core tip: The decision to perform an endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP) in acute biliary pancreatitis (ABP) is often based on biochemical and radiological criteria despite they have been shown to be unreliable predictors of common bile duct stone presence. Endoscopic ultrasonography (EUS) has recently been proposed as the new gold standard in the diagnosis of choledocholithiasis. Accordingly, the present prospective pilot study was designed to investigate the clinical usefulness of early EUS in the management of ABP. Early EUS-guided ERCP is an accurate, safe and quick strategy as a first step in the management of ABP.