Hepatic perfussion changes in experimental acute pancreatitis

Dr.Semra TutcuHEPATIC PERFUSSION CHANGESIN EXPERIMENTAL ACUTE PANCREATITISDespite advances in diagnosis and treatment methods, acute pancreatitis isstill an important cause of high mortality and morbidity. In acute pancreatitis endorgans are affected in different degrees and it causes serious clinical disorders.It has been known that acute pancreatitis causes seconder changes indifferent organs especially in lung and kidneys, and liver is one of these involvedorgans. In different experimental studies, hepatic damages were shownhistopathologically but there are few studies about perfussion disorders thataccompany to these histopathologic changes. In this study, we aimed to investigatethe effect of moderate acute pancreatitis on liver perfussion.Forty Sprague-Dawley rats of both gender with avarage weights of 250 gramswere used in this study. Rats were randomized into two groups. Twenty rats were incontrol group and 20 in acute pancreatitis group. Caerulein was givenintraperitoneally to pancreatitis group in a dose of 50 µ/kg totally five times with onehour intervals and 0,9 % NaCl was injected intraperitoneally to control group rats in adose of 0.1 ml totally five times with one hour intervals. Six hours after the firstinjection 24 G branules were placed into femoral veins of rats under the anesthesia.Dynamic computerized tomography (CT) were perfomed following administration ofnon-ionic contrast agent via femoral vein. Perfussion maps were formed byprocessing the obtained images with perfussion CT software. Blood flow (BF) andblood volume (BV) values were obtained from these maps. The blood samples weretaken from femoral veins of rats for amylase studies. All pancreatic and liver tissueswere taken off with laparotomy and histopathologic investigation was performed. Therats were sacrificed at the end of the experiment. Student T test was used forstatistical analyses of findings and p value <0.05 was considered significant.In conclusion, our study showed the development of histopathologicallychanges like hepatic portal inflamation, sinusoidal dilatation and hepatocytesdegeneration. We found statistically significant increase in blood volume in both lobesof liver and in blood flow in right lobe of the liver. Although blood flow in left lobe ofthe liver increased, it did not reach statitifical significiance.New studies should be design to find out the mechanism of perfussionchanges in the liver in acute pancreatitis.