Does endoscopic ultrasound reliably identify chronic pancreatitis when other imaging modalities have been non-diagnostic?
EUS is a useful diagnostic tool confirming the diagnosis of chronic pancreatitis in 13 of 16 cases where histories were suspicious of chronic pancreatitis, and providing an alternative diagnosis in another two cases. EUS should be considered an important tool for diagnosis of chronic pancreatitis and should be used when cross-sectional imaging is non-diagnostic.
The optimized TRIzol-based method described in this report is suitable for the extraction of serum microRNAs and useful for the development of microRNAs as diagnostic biomarkers.