Cardiac Dysfunction and Its Relation to Degree of Esophageal Varices in Cirrhotic Patients

Document Type : Original Clinical

Authors

1 Department of Tropical Medicine and Infectious Diseases , Faculty of Medicine,Tanta university ,Tanta ,Egypt

2 Department of Cardiology, Faculty of Medicine,Tanta University ,Tanta ,Egypt

3 Department of Tropical Medicine and Infectious Diseases, Faculty of Medicine, Tanta University ,Tanta ,Egypt

Abstract

Background and study aim.
Esophageal varices can cause upper gastrointestinal bleeding. Due to vascular alterations and other factors, cardiac dysfunction can develop in cirrhotic individuals. It is strongly correlated with the severity of liver disorders. Therefore, this study examined the relationship between the degree of esophageal varices and cardiac dysfunction in cirrhotic patients.
Patients and methods
This cross-sectional study was carried out on 60 cirrhotic patients. They were divided into three groups: group I included 20 cirrhotic patients with no esophageal varices; Group II included 20 cirrhotic patients with small varices; and Group III included 20 cirrhotic patients with large varices. Laboratory investigations, ultrasonography, echocardiography, and electrocardiography were done for all patients.
Results
A highly statistically significant difference was found between group III and the other two groups regarding having a history of upper GIT bleeding (p-value <0.001) and the corrected QT interval (QTc) (p-value <0.001). A statistically significant difference was found regarding the relation between the Child score of the patients and cardiomyopathy (p = 0.001). A strong positive correlation was found between the Child score and QTc (p<0.001). Also, a strong positive correlation was found between the degree of varices and QTc (p = 0.001). Other parameters evaluated by echocardiography showed no statistically significant difference between the studied groups (p> 0.5).
Conclusion.
Only a prolonged QT interval strongly relates to large varices regarding cardiac alterations and their linkage with the degree of esophageal varices. In our study, echocardiographic parameters had no relation to esophageal varices.

Keywords

{"sdg_fld":["3","4"]}

Main Subjects

Footnotes. Peer reviewers: Ahmed Fathy (Assistant professor of Internal medicine), Ahmed Agrodey (Assistant professor of Internal medicine), and Emad Fawzi (professor of Internal medicine). E- Editor: Salem Youssef Mohamed, Osama Ahmed Khalil, Mohamed Hassan Ali Emara. Copyright ©. This open-access article is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). Its use, distribution, or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited. Disclaimer: The authors' claims in this article are solely their own and do not necessarily represent their affiliated organizations or those of the publisher, the editors, and the reviewers. Any product evaluated in this article or its manufacturer's claim is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher. Ethical consideration The ethical committee’s approval, with adherence to the Helsinki Declaration, was obtained before the start of the study, approval code 36264PR41/1/23. Consent for publication: All patients included in this research gave written informed permission to publish the data contained within this study. Data and materials availability: The datasets used or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. Competing interests: The authors declare that they have no competing interests. Funding: This study had no funding from any resource. Authors’ contributions K H A was responsible for conception and revision, and NMM and EMH were accountable for interpreting and analyzing data. K H A, NMM, and EMH wrote the manuscript, which was revised and approved by all co-authors.

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics