## 3 Results  
Patients included in the prospective cohort had been diagnosed with the following conditions: bile duct stones, choledochal cysts; cholangiocarcinoma, benign biliary strictures, post-operatory bile duct injury, chronic pancreatitis and pancreatic cancer, compressive pancreatic cystic lesions, tumors of the major papilla, and suspected type I sphincter of Oddi dysfunction. The latter could not be confirmed due to the lack of local availability of sphincter of Oddi manometry. Within our cohort, we found no significant correlation between patients' background parameters and post-ERCP pancreatitis as seen in Table 1.  
As shown in Table 2, overall complication rates slightly overached 10%, of which the most frequent AEs were post-ERCP infections--acute cholangitis and cholecystitis (8.93%), followed by PEP (8.68%), post-sphincterotomy bleeding, and perforations occurring in a clearly lower frequency. Moreover, we evaluated the association between PEP and other concomitant adverse events, as stated in Table 3. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c} \hline
**Patients (n = 403)** & **Complications** & **PEP** & **Bleeding** & **Infection** & **Perforation** \\ \hline n (\%) & 77 (19.11) & 35 (8.68) & 12 (2.98) & 36 (8.93) & 3 (0.74) \\ \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 2: Overall complication rates in the studied population. Some patients developed more than one AE. Correlations between PEP, post-sphincterotomy bleeding, and post-ERCP infections are shown in Table 3. The highest significant correlation was registered between PEP and infections, with an incidence of 0.99%, followed by 0.5% of patients who developed PEP and post-sphincterotomy bleeding and 0.25% of patients who experienced post-ERCP infections and bleeding. Only three perforation cases occurred in the prospective cohort, one of which developed PEP, and another developed post-sphincterotomy bleeding. The vast majority of patients with post-ERCP AEs had only one type of complication. As shown in Table 3, the mean length of stay of the cohort was 13 days, being significantly lower than that of PEP patients, which reached 16 days (\(Z=3.73\), \(p=0.0001\)). The survival rate of patients with PEP was estimated using the Kaplan-Meier method after the 60 d of prospective follow-up and direct survival analysis. The life table analysis is shown in Table 4. Subsequently, the Kaplan-Meier curve was drawn (Figure 1), showing a statistically significant decline in the survival rate of patients with PEP when compared to the other patients in the prospective cohort (82.8% vs. 93.2%, \(p=0.0387\), LRT \(=-2.185\), \(p=0.0288\)). A statistically significant decline was shown in the survival rate of patients with PEP when compared to the prospective cohort (\(p=0.0288\)). Subsequently, we searched whether the presence of SIRS and qSOFA could predict organic dysfunctions, length of stay, and survival rates in patients with PEP. As shown in Table 5, the predictive power of such indicators was evaluated using ROC curves and study of the AUCs. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c} \hline \hline
**Time Interval of Follow-Up** & **PEP Patients** & **Non-PEP Patients** \\ \hline
**(Days)** & \multicolumn{2}{c}{**Survival Rate (\%)**} \\ \hline
7 & 100 & 100 \\
13 & 97.1429 & 98.0978 \\
19 & 88.5714 & 97.0109 \\
25 & 88.5714 & 96.7391 \\
31 & 88.5714 & 96.7391 \\
37 & 88.5714 & 96.1957 \\
43 & 88.5714 & 95.9239 \\
49 & 85.7143 & 94.5652 \\
55 & 85.7143 & 94.2935 \\
61 & 82.8572 & 93.2065 \\ \hline \multicolumn{3}{c}{WW \(=-3.422\); Sum = 30.853;} \\ Log-rank test & \multicolumn{2}{c}{Var \(=2.4529\)} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{\(p=0.02888\)} \\ \multicolumn{3}{c}{Test \(=-2.18516\)} \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular} PEP: post-endoscopic retrograde cholangiocarcinomaretography pancreatitis.  
\end{table} 
Table 4: Life table evaluating survival rate of patients with post-endoscopic retrograde cholangiocarcinomaretography pancreatitis.