الفهرس 
Portal hypertensionOnly 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 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.