Symptomatic Annular Pancreas in the Adult

ANNULAR pancreas, so named by Ecker 21 in 1862, had been previously described by Tiedemann63 in 1818. For many years thereafter the con-dition was considered an anatomic curiosity, encountered very rarely at the autopsy table. As recently as 1944 the standard textbooks of gastro-enterology, with the exception of Bockus,6 either make no mention of this condition or dismiss it with a very few lines. Today annular pancreas is a clinical problem, and there is agreement in recent reports that it is not so rare a condition as it was once thought to be. According to Ravitch and Woods,50 annular pancreas is the only known congenital defect that may remain dormant symptomatically until adulthood and even throughout a normal life span. Cases of annular pancreas fall into the following classification: