Acute abdominal pain in children.

This preliminary communication describes the initial results of a further special study investigating the disease spectrum and clinical presentation in a total of 1080 children admitted to hospital with acute abdominal pain (677 from the Children's Hospital, Sheffield, England, and the remaining 403 from hospitals in Paris, Oslo, Copenhagen, and Deventer). The disease spectrum in children differs radically from that in adults, well over 90% of cases being due to either acute appendicitis or non-specific abdominal pain (NSAP). The clinical presentation of both appendicitis and NSAP was found to differ from that in older age groups. These findings imply clearly that the use of the existing OMGE database for computer-aided diagnosis--using data drawn from cases of all ages--may not be optimal in children. A fresh database (using only children's data) was therefore created and tested. Its sensitivity for appendicitis was equivalent to that of inexperienced clinicians (79.6% versus 77.3%). The computer's specificity (over 70%) was higher than that of clinicians (52.7%). The findings also re-emphasise the value of disciplined data collection, and the implications for teaching are discussed.