Please read Dr. Peck’s article in Gastro Hep Advances titled, “Ten-Year Trends of Persistent Mortality with Gallstone Disease: A Retrospective Cohort Study in New Jersey.“
Gallstone disease has been said to have reached epidemic proportions, with up to twenty percent of the total US population having asymptomatic disease and 20–50 percent of those who are asymptomatic developing symptomatic gallstone disease in their lifetime. Asymptomatic gallstone disease is known to be associated with very common health risks in the United States including high-calorie diets, hyperinsulinism or insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes mellitus, dyslipidemia, obesity, and metabolic syndrome, which are associated with mortality.
Symptomatic gallstone disease requiring treatment, increasing greater than 20 percent in the last three decades of the 20th century, results from the progression of asymptomatic disease due to gallstone impaction of the physiologic drainage of the gallbladder, pancreas, liver, or intestine. Complications of gallstone disease include symptomatic cholelithiasis, eg, biliary colic, cholecystitis, gallstone pancreatitis, choledocholithiasis, biliary cholangitis from choledocholithiasis, or gallstone ileus. As a result, diagnosed symptomatic gallstone disease is one of the most common and costly gastrointestinal disorders spanning the entire life course with over 60% of related care requiring hospital stays, totaling 1.2 million inpatient admissions annually. Indeed, it is the most common and an increasing clinical digestive disease requiring surgery in the United States. To read the full article.
Ten-Year Trends of Persistent Mortality with Gallstone Disease: A Retrospective Cohort Study in New Jersey. Peck GL, Kuo YH, Nonnenmacher E, Gracias VH, Hudson SV, Roy JA, Strom BL. Gastro Hep Adv. 2023;2(6):818-826. PMID: 38037550 PMCID: PMC10688394 DOI: 1016/j.gastha.2023.03.023