Emergency surgery for Meckel's diverticulum

Meckel's diverticulum was first described by Fabricius Hildanus in 1598. The name derives from the German anatomist Johann Friedrich Meckel who described the embryological and pathological features in 1809 [1]. Although it generally remains silent but life threatening complications may arise making it an important structure for having a detailed knowledge of its anatomical and pathophysiological properties to deal with such complications.The literature is replete with the description of Meckel's diverticulum for its clinical presentations and complications. A search of Pubmed with the word "Meckel's diverticulum" shows 2835 articles till May 2008. However, the emergency surgery part of the symptomatic Meckel's diverticulum is still deficient in the literature. This seems to be so because most of the articles have been in the form of case reports or case series, so that the management strategies have been highly individualized based on both the patients condition and on the surgeons perspective. This seems to be the appropriate approach in an emergency condition. We intend to underscore some general principles used by these surgeons in their emergency surgeries. The current work attempts to highlight the various life threatening complications of Meckel's diverticulum and to present the surgical strategies used in the emergency conditions so far in the form of a review of the works presented in the literature. Our aim behind this presentation is to cover the possible indications, methods, their complications and the outcome of these surgical techniques. For this, we made an extensive literature search using Google and Pubmed with the words-"Meckel's diverticulum", "Complications", "Management" and "Emergency surgery". All the relevant articles containing the surgical aspects of symptomatic Meckel's diverticulum till May 2008 were collected and analyzed.Meckel's diverticulum is the remain of the prenatal yolkstalk (Vitellointestinal duct). The yolk sac of the developin