More than half of people who receive antibiotics to treat appendicitis do not see their disease come back 10 years after the initial illness, a new study shows. The data come from one of the first clinical trials of the approach and bolster newly updated guidelines for treating appendicitis.
A quarter of a million people get appendicitis every year in the United States, when a blockage or infection inflames the appendix. For more than a century, doctors treating appendicitis have usually removed the organ, for fear it might rupture and cause severe infection. But in the last decade or so, trials of antibiotics have shown that appendicitis often resolves