Appendicitis in Children

Abdominal pain is a common clinical problem in children. The challenge is to determine which could be secondary to serious pathology. For the paediatric surgeon, the evaluation of a child with abdominal pain is often to ascertain if there is a surgically amenable pathology. The first clinical report of appendicitis in 1711 is credited to a German surgeon called Lorenz Heister (Ramsted et al., 1993). Appendicitis is the commonest acute childhood surgical abdominal emergency in developed countries. The peak incidence of acute appendicitis in children is in the second decade of life, at about 12years of age (Pearl et al., 1995; Tsze et al., 2011). It is uncommon in children less than 5years old, rare in infants and neonates, slightly more frequent in males than females with an incidence ratio of 1:1.5. The overall lifetime risk of appendicitis is 7%, slightly higher in females.