Published online Dec 16, 2021. doi: 10.12998/wjcc.v9.i35.10927
Peer-review started: January 16, 2021
First decision: May 4, 2021
Revised: May 19, 2021
Accepted: October 27, 2021
Article in press: October 27, 2021
Published online: December 16, 2021
Processing time: 327 Days and 20.4 Hours
Chronic pancreatitis (CP) may need invasive surgical interventions. There is no current knowledge of long-term outcomes and prevalence of surgery for CP.
We wanted to investigate the current state of pancreatic surgery in Finland for CP.
Our objective was to find long-term outcomes of patients who have pancreatic surgery for CP pain in Finland.
We gathered all CP patients who had pancreatic surgery in Finland in 2000-2008 via the Finnish National Institute for Health and Welfare registry. We gathered information about the time of CP diagnosis, etiology of CP, previous CP treatments, type of current surgical therapy, postoperative complications, possible reoperations, and exocrine and endocrine pancreatic insufficiency.
We found that surgery for CP is rare in Finland but most patients (70%) are pain free after surgery. Opiate usage was less after surgery.
CP surgery is rare and produces good long-term results in CP patients.
Our study was limited because of the small number of patients but we provide a long 16-year follow-up and our study contains all of CP patients in Finland who had pancreatic surgery.