Ashcroft hospitalized with severe pancreatitis

Friday March 5, 2004

By SHANNON MCCAFFREY
WASHINGTON - Attorney General John Ashcroft spent Friday in the intensive care unit of a Washington hospital with a severe case of pancreatitis, a painful condition expected to sideline him for at least a week

On rare occasions the illness can be fatal, according to medical experts. Doctors expect to know more about Ashcroft's condition in the coming days.

Believing he had a stomach flu, Ashcroft canceled an appearance in Alexandria, Va., on Thursday where he was scheduled to discuss guilty verdicts handed down in a terrorism case. Instead, he went home and his condition worsened. White House physician Dr. Daniel Parks visited Ashcroft and instructed him to go to the emergency room.

After a complete exam, doctors at George Washington University Hospital diagnosed him with a severe case of gallstone pancreatitis. He was admitted to the intensive care unit at the downtown Washington hospital, where he's being monitored closely and treated with antibiotics, according to Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo.

Pancreatitis, in which the pancreas is inflamed, can be caused by excessive consumption of alcohol or, in Ashcroft's case, a gallstone that becomes lodged in the bile duct blocking the passage of digestive enzymes into the small intestine.

The condition can become dangerous when other organs, such as the kidneys or stomach, become infected or the production of insulin by the pancreas is blocked, said Dr. Anthony Kalloo, a specialist in pancreatic disease at John Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore.

Symptoms include sudden and intense abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting and fever.

"It is very painful," Kalloo said. " I feel sorry for him."

In most cases, the gallstone eventually passes through the small intestine on its own, but sometimes a device must be threaded through the digestive tract to remove the gallstone.

Some 80,000 people suffer from pancreatitis every year, Kalloo said, and some 10 percent of those cases are classified as severe, as Ashcroft's was. In the most severe cases, the death rate can be 15 percent, he said.


It's the first serious illness for Ashcroft, 61, who played football at Yale University and stays fit with regular games of basketball at the FBI gym.