The role of laparoscopy in the diagnosis of acute appendicitis

Patients with acute appendicitis who present with an atypical clinical picture are frequently subjected to a series of laboratory and x ray tests and sometimes to prolonged observation before surgery. There is a significant number of normal appendixes found at laparotomy, particularly in some subgroups of patients such as the immunocompromised, the elderly, and the young woman. Laparoscopy was done in 38 patients with right lower quadrant pain of undetermined cause after extensive diagnostic efforts. This group of patients included men and women with an even distribution of ages between 20 and 78 years. Laparoscopy was done under local anesthesia to better establish the site of pain if no obvious pathology could be visualized. Acute appendicitis was confirmed in only 26.3 per cent of the cases, and a wide variety of nonappendiceal diseases were identified, the majority of them requiring no surgery. Diagnostic laparoscopy performed under local anesthesia should be considered in patients suspected to have acute appendicitis, regardless of age and sex, who present with an atypical picture and who still offer diagnostic doubts after other available conventional tests.