ETIOLOGICAL DISTRIBUTION AND CLINICAL FEATURES OF CIRRHOTIC PATIENTS: SINGLE TERTIARY REFERRAL CENTER EXPERIENCE

AYHAN BALKAN¹, SAMET ALKAN², SEZGIN BARUTÇU¹, BUĞRA TOLGA KONDUK¹, ABDULLAH EMRE YILDIRIM¹, RAMAZAN ERDEM ER¹, MURAT TANER GÜLŞEN¹

¹Gaziantep University, Faculty of Medicine, Department of Gastroenterology, Gaziantep, Turkey - ² Gaziantep University, Faculty of Medicine, Department of İnternal Medicine, Gaziantep, Turkey

Introduction: Cirrhosis has various etiologies, and the etiologic distribution differs from center to center. Our aim is to reveal the etiological distribution and clinical features of cirrhotic patients.

Materials and methods: We retrospectively recruited 1144 patients. Of patients, 480 were cirrhotic, 664 were non-cirrhotic. Patients were diagnosed by means of clinical features, laboratory values, radiologic imaging and biopsy when required.

Results: Of the 480 cirrhotic patients, 250 were male (52%), and the mean age was 57.6 years. In cirrhotics, 289 (60.2%) patients were decompensated. However, hepatitis B virus (HBV) - hepatitis C virus (HCV) coinfection and Budd-Chiari syndrome were found to have highest tendency of decompensation (85.7%, 84.6% respectively). Child-Pugh classification was evaluated: 243 (50.6%) class A, 164 (34.2%) class B and73 (15.2%) class C patients were analyzed. Ascites in 206 (42.9%), hepatic encephalopathy in 55 (11.4%), hepatocellular carcinoma in 23 (4.7%), and spontaneous bacterial peritonitis in 17 (3.5%) of the patients were determined. In the group of patients with viral etiology, while 160 (53.9%) of 297 cirrhotic patients were HCV, 137 (46.1%) were HBV, 503 (75.8%) out of 664 non-cirrhotics were HBV and 161 (24.2%) were HCV infected.

Conclusion: Although HBV was more common in chronic hepatitides, cirrhosis was mostly caused by HCV infection. The reason of this may be due to anti-viral use for HBV. We found that decompensation rate was higher for Budd-Chiari syndrome and HBVHCV coinfected patients. Cryptogenic cirrhosis still continues to have high prevalence. The re