Hospital mortality of cirrhosis: Better, but still room for improvement!

摘要

According to WHO projections, Cirrhosis will be the 9th most common cause of death in the western world by 2015 and the costs of hospital admission owing to complications in the US approximate $13Bn. It is well known that patients with cirrhosis showing signs of decompensation have a higher mortality (1, 2). Several studies tried to define the impact of different clinical features of decompensation on survival (3). When patients are hospitalized, mortality ranges between 44 and 74% (4). This apparently heterogenous outcome can be explained by the fact that it is not the severity of liver disease, but the degree of end-organ failure that determines outcome.