IAP Guidelines in Acute Pancreatitis – So What?

Accessible online at: www.karger.com/dsu The last three decades have yielded tremendous insight into the pathogenesis and effective treatment of acute pancreatitis and especially in severe acute (necrotizing) pancreatitis. This panel of pancreatic experts from the IAP Council have evaluated the literature using evidencebased principles leading to a grading of the 11 guidelines proposed (table 1), 10 of which are grade B (intermediate but strongly evidence-based on non-randomized but welldesigned studies) and 1 of which is grade A (strongly evidence-based on randomized controlled trials and/or metaanalysis). What are we to glean from these guidelines? How are they or will they be useful? First, these guidelines are not just vacant opinions of the ‘experts’, but rather evidence-