A Prospective Study on Alcohol Drinking Patterns, Dependency and Disease Severity in Alcohol Related Liver Cirrhosis

Abstract

Aim:To determine the relation between the alcohol dependency and alcoholic liver disease states objectively with well-defined scoring systems.

Design: A prospective observational study conducted on the in-patients diagnosed with Liver Cirrhosis. Setting: Asian Institute of Gastroenterology, Hyderabad, Telangana, India.

Participants: A total of 255 patients (220 males and 35 females) between October 2017 and January 2018. Parameters: Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT), Severity of Alcohol Dependence questionnaire (SADQ) and liver assessment with MELD score, Maddrey’s Discriminant Fraction and Child-PUGH score. Results: Of the 255 patients, 89 were non-alcoholic patients and 166 were alcoholic patients of which 127 were alcohol dependent and 39 were alcohol non-dependent. In the alcohol dependent patients, there were 47/127 mild alcohol dependent, 48/127 moderate alcohol dependent and 32/127 severe alcohol dependent. When compared with the severity levels, we found that most of the alcoholic patients has shown high severity and most of them were alcohol dependents. In non-alcoholic patients, most of them had shown the disease condition to be moderate. When the increasing disease severity was compared with the increasing dependency values, it has shown negative correlation.

Conclusion: From the study, it can be concluded that the cause for the liver cirrhosis in most of the cases is consumption of alcohol but, when the severity scores has been compared it states that the increase in the alcohol dependence is not specifically related to the increasing disease severity.