[Acute abdomen--anesthesiologic and intensive care management]

The expression "acute abdomen" is a provisional destination of a complex of various abdominal diseases which require quick diagnostic as well as urgent surgical therapy. A close interdisciplinary cooperation during the whole perioperative period is of high importance for the prognosis of this potentially life-threatening syndrome. The anesthetist must have profound knowledge on causes and clinical signs of this disease, on diagnostic measures and on therapeutic principles. Anaesthesiological problems arise from the discrepancy between an urgent operation on one hand and the necessity of an improvement of the preoperative status of the patient on the other. Furthermore, these patients have high risks of aspiration due to disturbed motility of the gastrointestinal tract. Intensive therapy of these patients is characterized by the peculiarity that a primarily local abdominal disease is frequently followed by severe extraperitoneal general reactions and multiple organ failure, respectively.