Acute pancreatitis is an unpredictable disease. Most patients develop edema of the pancreas and quickly recover whatever the therapy (or lack thereof), but a minority develop severe complications with significant morbidity and mortality. When the disease is studied in experimental animal models,1 to distinguish between the 2 forms, it appears that all processes begin in acinar cells2 but then develop in different directions. The way acinar cells undergo injury and cell death seems to determine the ultimate severity.
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Sendler et al. (2016) studied this question.