Clinical pancreatic disorder I: Acute pancreatitis

The Annual American Pancreas Club is an important event for communicating around clinical pancreatic disorders, just as the European, Japanese, Indian, and the International Pancreatic association. Even though the meeting is only 1½ day there were 169 different abstracts and a “How do I do it session.” Among all these abstracts on the pancreas there are some real pearls, but they are almost always well hidden, never highlighted – all abstracts are similarly presented – and will too soon be forgotten. The present filing of the abstracts is one way (not the way) to get the pancreatic abstracts a little more read and a little more remembered – and perhaps a little more cited. It should also be understood that most of the abstracts are short summaries of hundreds of working hours (evenings, nights, weekends, holidays, you name them …) in the laboratory or in the clinic, often combined with blood, sweat and tears. The authors should be shown at least some respect, and their abstracts should not only be thought of as “just another little abstract” – and the best respect they can be shown are that they will be remembered to be another brick in our scientific wall. Now the pancreatic abstracts of American Pancreas Club 2011 are gathered and filed with the aim to give them a larger audience than they have had in their original abstract book. However, it is obvious that most of clinical fellows do not have time to read all the abstracts. For them I have made a “clinical highlight section” of 10 percent of all the pancreatic abstracts. If someone else should have done some collection of abstract, there should probably have been other selections, but as this is not the case, the editor's choices are the highlighted ones. The article as series I of clinical highlight section is present, and more series will be present in the following issues. If readers will remember some of the abstracts better after reading this “abstract of abstracts”, it was worth the efforts – and without efforts there will be little progress.