الفهرس 
Introduction and Aim of the WorkOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Recommendations suggest that the presence and degree of
portal hypertension must be evaluated in all patients with
cirrhosis. But unfortunately, clinical investigation of PH is mainly
invasive and implies either hepatic vein catheterization and
hepatic vein pressure gradient measurement or endoscopy for
esophageal varices screening and grading. Transient elastography
has been recently demonstrated to be a reliable noninvasive tool
for assessing hepatic fibrosis in patients with CHC with achieving
the greatest accuracy for detecting severe fibrosis and cirrhosis
and in some studies correlated also with the severity of PH and
the presence of esophageal varices.
The aim of this study is to investigate whether spleen
stiffness, assessed by transient elastography, is a useful tool for
grading chronic liver diseases and to compare its performance in
predicting the presence and size of esophageal varices in liver
cirrhosis patients with other validated noninvasive approaches as
platelet count to spleen size ratio, AST/ALT ratio (AAR), AST
platelet ratio index (APRI), platelet count (PC).
This study was conducted on a total of 40 patients with
HCV chronic liver disease. All were recruited from Internal
Medicine Department of Ain Shams University Hospitals in the
SUMMARY
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period from (June 2013) to (November 2014). They were divided
into two groups; group I without cirrhosis and group II with
cirrhosis. All patients were enrolled for the study after signing an
informed consent that was previously revised and approved,
together with the study protocol, by the Ethical Committee of
Scientific Research of Faculty of Medicine, Ain Shams University.
All patients were subjected to full history taking, clinical
examination, pelviabdominal US, Fibroscan for liver and spleen,
upper endoscopy and laboratory investigations including liver
function tests, complete blood count, prothrombin profile (PT),
INR, partial thromboplastin time (PTT), renal function tests,
serum alpha feto protein (AFP), HBs Ag, HCV Ab.