A 9-month-old adult female Sprague-Dawley rat from a colony of spinally transected rats presented 10 days after spinal cord transection surgery with a 2-day history of abdominal distention.

A 48-year-old woman reported acute abdominal pain for the previous 3 hours. Clinical examination of the underweight patient (BMI 17.4) found a tight abdomen with diffuse guarding and no bowel sounds.

Before entering the abdominal cavity, we withdrew 35 ml of ... Histopathological examination revealed a diffuse acute inflammation of the viscera and peritoneal membranes that we diagnosed as ...