[Acute pancreatitis and red cell distribution width (RDW)I at early phase of disease]

During last decade, many new biomarkers have been proposed for early diagnosis of acute pancreatitis and prognosis of its severity. However clinical availability of many markers are limited due to costly and time. consuming laboratory methods used, for their assessment, including ELISA technique. Recent studies revealed the usefulness of red cell distribution width (RDW), as a predictor of unfa vorable prognosis in many disease states. RDW is an easily available index generated automatically as a part of standard complete blood count In our group of 40 acute pancreatitis patients, RDW values assessed du ring first 5 days of disease, correlated positively with the duration of hospital stay and the severity of disease as well as with the concentration of selected inflammatory markers. Patients who died had significantly higher RDW comparing to survivors. Our results indicate that RDW may be helpful in early prediction of clinical course of acute pancreatitis.