Cirrhosis is a severe liver condition associated with various complications, including inflammation.
Recent research has uncovered a valuable insight: markers of inflammation can predict mortality within 180 days in patients newly diagnosed with cirrhosis.
However, these markers do not exhibit a significant correlation with liver-related hospital admissions, highlighting the complexity of the disease.
Investigating Inflammatory Markers
A study conducted by Thit Mynster Kronborg and colleagues from Hvidovre University Hospital in Denmark collected plasma samples from 149 patients newly diagnosed with cirrhosis.
The researchers aimed to explore whether systemic markers of inflammation could provide insights into both mortality and liver-related admissions within 180 days of diagnosis.
To validate their findings, the disease courses of these patients were compared with those of a separate cohort of 86 cirrhosis patients.
Inflammatory Markers and Mortality
The results revealed that out of the 92 inflammatory markers studied, 20 exhibited significant correlations with 180-day mortality in cirrhosis patients.
This suggests that specific markers of inflammation can serve as indicators of the risk of death in this population.
Contrary to expectations, the study did not identify any inflammatory markers significantly associated with liver-related hospital admissions in both the study group and the validation cohort.
This surprising discovery suggests that while inflammation plays a role in predicting mortality, it may not be as directly linked to hospital admissions related to liver complications in cirrhosis patients.
To further assess the predictive power of inflammatory markers, logistic regression models were employed. These models considered various factors, including clinical variables, inflammatory markers, clinical scores, or combinations thereof.
The results showed that these models had areas under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) ranging from 0.73 to 0.79 for mortality prediction and from 0.61 to 0.73 for liver-related admissions. While the models performed moderately well, they excelled at predicting mortality compared to liver-related admissions, as observed in the validation cohort.
Conclusion
The study offers valuable insights into the role of inflammation markers in predicting outcomes for patients with newly diagnosed cirrhosis. While specific markers can effectively predict 180-day mortality, their ability to forecast liver-related admissions is limited.
This research underscores the complexity of cirrhosis and highlights the importance of considering various factors when assessing patient outcomes.
If you care about health, please read studies that vitamin D can help reduce inflammation, and vitamin K could lower your heart disease risk by a third.
For more information about health, please see recent studies about new way to halt excessive inflammation, and results showing foods that could cause inflammation.
The research findings can be found in Scientific Reports.
