Diagnosis of Chronic Pancreatitis

It is difficult to some extent to make the definitive diagnosis of chronic pancreatitis, especially if the disease is not recognized by the physicians treating the patients. Basing on the presence of several different diagnostic characters of the CP, the Zurich workshop on alcoholic chronic pancreatitis proposed a classification in which CP was divided into ‘probable’ and ‘definite’ (Ammann 1997). There is a similar grading recommended by the Japan Pancreas Society (Homma et al. 1997). In 2007, Schneider and his colleagues established a new MANNHEIM classification system referring to the understandings of the Zurich workshop, but they decided to include smaller amounts of alcohol intake as risk factors for the development of CP than before, as well as a subgroup of ‘borderline’ CP into the classification system. The M-ANNHEIM diagnostic criteriaof CP are listed in Table 7.1 (Schneider et al. 2007).