Apéndice

Introduction: acute appendicitis is one of the most common causes of acute abdomen and one of the most common indications of emergency abdominal surgery. It occurs most frequently between the second and third decades of life, being higher in the age group between 10-19 years. We present a case of a patient who was incidentally diagnosed with acute appendicitis through colonoscopy, in the context of a weight-loss study.
Case report: a 47-year-old male patient with a history of arterial hypertension consulted for weight loss without specific symptoms. Physical examination showed no significant alterations and clinical examinations did not reveal elevated inflammatory parameters or anemia. An upper gastrointestinal endoscopy was initially performed, which was reported normal, and later a colonoscopy was performed, which revealed a prominent appendicular fossa with spontaneous discharge of purulent material through the appendicular orifice and sigmoid diverticulosis. Antibiotic treatment and deferred laparoscopic appendectomy were performed, and the histopathological study reported acute appendicitis.
Conclusions: appendicitis is one of the most frequent causes of acute abdomen and the most common indication for emergency abdominal surgery. Currently its diagnosis is mainly clinical, and there is no clinical presentation that accurately predicts the presence of the disease, with several atypical presentations being described in the literature. Sometimes the diagnosis can be specified by exploratory laparoscopy, in cases where clinical examinations are inconclusive, or even by endoscopic procedures.