Assessment of Complications After Pancreatic Surgery

To define a simple and reproducible classification of complications following pancreaticoduodenectomy (PD) based on a therapy-oriented severity grading system.

While mortality is rare after PD, morbidity rates remain high. The lack of standardization in evaluating morbidity after PD has severely hampered meaningful comparisons over time and among centers. We adapted a novel classification of complication to stratify morbidity by severity after PD, to test whether the incidence of pancreatic fistula has changed over time, and to identify risk factors in a single North American center.