Pancreatitis Journal Article

I chose this article titled “Ever-increasing diversity of drug-induced pancreatitis” by the World Journal of Gastroenterology because it related to the case I published my EM H&P on and it was published only about 2 years ago. We know that the most common causes of pancreatitis include gallstones, alcohol, and hypertriglyceridemia, but this article takes a deep dive on drug-induced pancreatitis and which specific drugs seem to be culprits of this. I was especially interested in this article because many of the drug classes proposed to be potential causes of drug-induced pancreatitis overlapped with the medications being taken by the patient I saw with acute pancreatitis (statins, NSAIDs, anti-glycemic, and more). Although direct correlation between many of these drugs and acute pancreatitis has not been concretely established, this study aimed to accumulate data and produce statistics on what has been reported thus far. It seems that drug-induced pancreatitis has been associated with higher morbidity, longer hospital stays, and increased healthcare costs, so putting efforts towards finding which drugs have higher risk of producing adverse effect of acute pancreatitis is important. Therefore, documenting which medications are being taken when a patient comes in with pancreatitis of unknown cause is one of the first steps towards identifying these agents.