ACUTE PANCREATITIS: IS THERE ANY RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HEMATOCRIT AND SEVERITY OF THE DISEASE?

Abstract

Introduction. Acute pancreatitis (AP) is one of the unsolved clinical problems in the practice of modern gastroenterology, surgery, and emergency medicine, which does not lose its relevance even with the advent of modern and high-tech diagnostic and therapeutic solutions. The failure of modern methods to diagnose and stratify the severity of the disease in the early stages after hospitalization of patients lead to the loss of precious time at the beginning of resuscitation measures in severe forms of AP. The aim. To assess the presence and strength of the correlation between hematocrit count and the severity of AP on the first day of the disease. Materials and methods. Polychoric analysis and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis were used to assess the association and predictive value of hematocrit with the severity of AP. Only patients who arrived at the hospital within 24 hours of the onset of the disease were included in the study. Results. The correlation coefficient φ2 between hematocrit (at the reference value of 45%) and severity of AP is 0.34. The coefficient of mutual conjugation of K. Pearson (C) is equal to 0.5 which indicates the presence of a relationship between the hematocrit count and the severity of AP. After conducting the ROC analysis, it was determined that with the isolated use of hematocrit indicator provided its value of > 44.4%, almost 70% of patients were diagnosed with severe AP; almost 90% of patients with a hematocrit level of £ 44.4% did not have severe AP. Also, due to the rather high values of the indicators of the prognostic capacity of the ROC analysis, it is possible to state about the presence of prognostic significance of hematocrit indicator for severe AP within the first day from the onset of the disease. Conclusions. Thus, the hematocrit number has a significant relationship with the severity of AP when calculated during the first day from the onset of the disease, which makes it promising for building systems of stratification of the severity of AP earlier than suggested by revised Atlanta criteria.