[Acute abdomen in elderly patients].

Background: Ageing of Czech population and the increase of numbers of elderly people gives new tasks to whole medicine and surgery too.

Method And Results: Presented paper shows some aspects of occurrence, diagnostics and treatment of acute abdomen diseases--inflammatory and intestinal obstruction--in patients older than 60 years. It compares the occurrence and treatment results at an identical surgical department 30 and 60 years ago and nowadays.

Conclusions: Number of the treated patients older than 60 years increased four times during the followed period. Opposite to that, death rate of operated patients declined from 37.2% to today's 16.4%--undoubtedly thanks to modern good-quality perioperational treatment.