Pain relapses in the first ten years of chronic pancreatitis.

PURPOSE: To evaluate whether the annual number of pain relapses of chronic pancreatitis correlated with sex, type of pancreatitis, drinking and smoking, presence of intraductal calcifications, pancreaticojejunostomy, and length of follow-up in the first 10 years of follow-up. METHODS: The authors analyzed 205 nonobstructive chronic pancreatitis cases with at least a 10- year follow-up, for a total of 2,034 person/year observations. Data were recorded on the daily number of cigarettes smoked and grams of alcohol drunk, as well as the presence of intraductal calcifications, and performance of pancreaticojejunostomy. RESULTS: The model for multivariate autoregressive repeated measures analysis indicated that drinking (P <0.0001), smoking (P <0.0001), calcifications (P <0.0001), pancreaticojejunostomy (P <0.0011), and length of follow-up (P