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Cholecystitis accounts for 3–10% of cases of abdominal pain worldwide. [43] Cholecystitis caused an estimated 651,829 emergency department visits and 389,180 hospital admissions in the US in 2012. [44] The 2012 US mortality rate was 0.7 per 100,000 people. [44] The frequency of cholecystitis is highest in people age 50–69 years old. [43]
English: What is acute cholecystitis? When a gallstone gets lodged in either the cystic duct or the common bile duct, the gallbladder can get inflamed and even infected, leading to bile leakage and several complications involving the infiltration of bile into the blood.
Known as cholecystitis, inflammation of the gallbladder is commonly caused by obstruction of the duct with gallstones, which is known as cholelithiasis. Blocked bile accumulates, and pressure on the gallbladder wall may lead to the release of substances that cause inflammation, such as phospholipase. There is also the risk of bacterial infection.
Bile duct obstruction, which is usually present in acute cholangitis, is generally due to gallstones. 10–30% of cases, however, are due to other causes such as benign stricturing (narrowing of the bile duct without an underlying tumor), postoperative damage or an altered structure of the bile ducts such as narrowing at the site of an anastomosis (surgical connection), various tumors (cancer ...
The biliary tract can also serve as a reservoir for intestinal tract infections. Since the biliary tract is an internal organ, it has no somatic nerve supply, and biliary colic due to infection and inflammation of the biliary tract is not a somatic pain. Rather, pain may be caused by luminal distension, which causes stretching of the wall.
Common causes of an acute abdomen include a gastrointestinal perforation, peptic ulcer disease, mesenteric ischemia, acute cholecystitis, appendicitis, diverticulitis, pancreatitis, and an abdominal hemorrhage. However, this is a non-exhaustative list and other less common causes may also lead to an acute abdomen. [3]
Complications from gallstones may include inflammation of the gallbladder (cholecystitis), inflammation of the pancreas (pancreatitis), obstructive jaundice, and infection in bile ducts (cholangitis). [4] [6] Symptoms of these complications may include pain that lasts longer than five hours, fever, yellowish skin, vomiting, dark urine, and pale ...
Fibrosis of the gallbladder is another chronic process that occurs due to repeated acute inflammation (i.e., chronic cholecystitis), resulting in a shrunken, fibrotic (therefore hard), and calcified gallbladder ("porcelain gallbladder"), which typically will not present with Courvoisier's sign and is diagnosed with imaging.