Quality of Life after Frey's Procedure in Patients with Chronic Pancreatitis

Chronic pancreatitis is a debilitating disease, associated with excruciating abdominal pain, exocrine and endocrine pancreatic insufficiency. Different types of surgical techniques have been described for the management of complications of this disease. The most common procedure which has been adopted for improving the quality of life of the patients with chronic pancreatitis is Frey's Procedure. It is an organ preserving procedure in which the main pancreatic duct is drained by lateral pancreatico-jejunostomy along with coring of the head of the pancreas.

In this study, we have assessed the outcome of Frey's procedure in terms of quality of life in patients with chronic pancreatitis.

This was a prospective observational study done at a tertiary care center in West Bengal, India. The study period was from 2010 to 2014. All the patients who have undergone Frey's Procedure during the study duration and with the postoperative histopathology of chronic pancreatitis were included in this study. The preoperative and postoperative pain and quality of life assessment was done using VAS score (0-100) and EORTC QLQ-C30 (Version 3) respectively. The statistical analysis was performed with the help of Epi Info (TM) 3.5.3.

A total of 35 patients with chronic pancreatitis underwent Frey's procedure during the study period. The mean age (mean ± s.e) of the 33 patients included in the study was 38.48±5.55 years with a range of 29-49 years. The mean preoperative Physical Functional Domain (PFD), Physical Domain (PD), Emotional Domain (ED), Social Domain (SD) and general health raw score with standard errors were 32.06±0.40, 37.86±0.36, 15.18±0.32, 8.63±0.31 and 4.48±0.26 respectively. ANOVA showed that there was significant differences in PFD, PD, ED, SD and GH values during different time period of follow up (p<0.0001) and as per Critical Difference the postoperative values of PFD, PD, ED and SD decreased while postoperative value of GH increased significantly in different months compared to the preoperative values.

We conclude that Frey's procedure is a low risk surgery, which significantly improves the quality of life of the patients with chronic pancreatitis in all the domains and can be recommended as a surgical therapy for such patients.