Diagnosing and treating pediatric appendicitis
Abdominal pain is one of the most common reasons children visit the emergency department. Appendicitis is the most frequent surgical emergency in pediatrics, affecting approximately 80,000 children in the U.S. every year. At Children’s Minneapolis and St. Paul emergency departments our pediatric surgeons perform about 750 appendectomies every year.
To help improve pediatric care for children across the U.S., clinicians at Children’s Minnesota are currently working with non-pediatric emergency departments to diagnose appendicitis without using CT scans whenever possible. It’s one of the first implementation studies funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH) for pediatric emergency medicine and could positively affect millions of children.
