Clinical presentations of gall stone

Background: Gallstone disease is one of the most common problems affecting the gastrointestinal tract and the most common biliary pathology, gallstone induced complications have a limited and overlapping pattern of clinical presentations Objective: To evaluate the modalities of clinical presentations of gallstone disease with its incidence among different age groups with their management and outcome. Methods: This study was conducted on a total of (53) adult patients including (48) female (90.5%) and (5) male (9.5%) patients with gallstone disease with their age ranging from 18 to 73 years who were presented to Al- Yarmouk teaching hospital from the period between April 2014 to April 2015, they were divided according to their clinical presentations into two main groups as cold cases group and emergency cases group, within each group a different clinical sub groups were included. Results: Among the (53) adult patients included in the study (10) different clinical presentations of gallstone disease were identified, four of them who included (37) patient (19.6%) belong to the cold cases group and six of them who included (16) patients (8.4%) belong to the emergency cases y group .within the cold cases group (4) different clinical subgroups of presentations were identified including symptomatic gallstones, chronic cholecystits, jaundice, incidental gallstones and within the emergency cases group six different clinical subgroups of presentations including acute cholecystitis, acute biliary pancreatitis, cholangitis, abdominal mass, acute abdomen, intestinal obstruction, all the included patients underwent cholecystectomy either as elective or emergency surgery. Conclusion: Gallstone disease is common and has a wide spectrum of different clinical presentations from silent and asymptomatic to severe life threatening, Among the (10) different clinical presentations of gallstone disease who were encountered six of them were emergency ones, the presentations of gallstone disease as a cold cases outway that as an emergency cases. The highest presenting age group in cold cases group was between 31-40 years and the lowest age group was between 10-20 years, while the highest presenting age group in emergency cases group was between 51-60 years and the lowest presenting age group was between 10-20 years. The highest clinical presentation in cold cases group was chronic cholecystitis while the highest clinical presentation in emergency cases group was acute cholecystitis. The incidence of emergency presentations of gallstone disease is higher in elderly patients than in young age groups.