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Article: Not everybody must get stones: how to avoid gallbladder disease.
- Article from:
- Nutrition Action Healthletter
- Article date:
- November 1, 2004
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 Center for Science in the Public Interest. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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When John Ashcroft experienced sudden abdominal pains so severe he couldn't attend a press conference last March, the Attorney General of the United States became another of the one million Americans to suffer from gallbladder disease this year.
In Ashcroft's case, an errant gallstone was blocking the flow of digestive enzymes from his pancreas to his small intestine. That caused the enzymes to back up and begin eating away at the pancreas itself, an extremely painful and sometimes fatal condition called acute gallstone pancreatitis.
Ashcroft's gallstone later slipped free and passed into his intestines. But when his doctors found more stones waiting in ...