Clinical Study Preventive Role of Wire-Guided Cannulation to Reduce Hyperamylasemia and Pancreatitis Following Endoscopic Retrograde Cholangiopancreatography

Copyright © 2012 Amir Houshang Mohammad Alizadeh et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Background and Study Aims. The usefulness of wire-guided cannulation for avoiding hyperamylasemia and pancreatitis following endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP) is conflicting, and therefore we designed this study to determine whether wire-guided cannulation reduces the rate of post-ERCP hyperamylasemia and pancreatitis and compare its efficacy to conventional method. Patients and Methods. Seven hundred and forty-eight patients with hepatobiliary diseases consecutively underwent diagnostic or therapeutic ERCP at the unit of Taleghani referral hospital in Tehran. Among them, 546 patients were eligible for wire-guided cannulation and underwent this procedure and others underwent sphincterotome biliary cannulation using contrast injection as the conventional method. Results. Patients in the two groups were comparable in terms of gender and age. Successful biliary cannulation was achieved similary in the guidewire and conventional group (89.2 % versus 86.4%) that in 5.4 % and 14.1 % of them it was difficultly performed, respectively (P = 0.003). The main pancreatic duct was more visualized in 99.0 % of patients in conventional group in comparison with 79.0 % in another group (P < 0.001). Multivariate regression analysis showed that wire-guided cannulation had a protective role for post-ERCP hyperamylasemia (OR: 0.336, 95 % CI: 0.181