Copyright
©The Author(s) 2015. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Hepatol. Nov 8, 2015; 7(25): 2571-2577
Published online Nov 8, 2015. doi: 10.4254/wjh.v7.i25.2571
Published online Nov 8, 2015. doi: 10.4254/wjh.v7.i25.2571
Defining acute-on-chronic liver failure: East, West or Middle ground?
Harneet Singh, C Ganesh Pai, Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Kasturba Medical College, Manipal University, Manipal, Karnataka 576104, India
Author contributions: Singh H and Pai CG conceived the issues which formed the content of the manuscript and wrote the manuscript.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors have no conflict of interests.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Dr. C Ganesh Pai, MD, DM, Professor and Head, Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Kasturba Medical College, Manipal University, Madhav Nagar, Near Tiger Circle, Manipal, Karnataka 576104, India. cgpai@yahoo.co.in
Telephone: +91-820-2922192 Fax: +91-820-2571934
Received: May 27, 2015
Peer-review started: May 30, 2015
First decision: July 27, 2015
Revised: August 13, 2015
Accepted: October 16, 2015
Article in press: October 19, 2015
Published online: November 8, 2015
Peer-review started: May 30, 2015
First decision: July 27, 2015
Revised: August 13, 2015
Accepted: October 16, 2015
Article in press: October 19, 2015
Published online: November 8, 2015
Core Tip
Core tip: Acute-on-chronic liver failure, a relatively new clinical entity seen in patients with chronic liver disease including cirrhosis, is associated with high morbidity and mortality. The two most commonly used definitions given by the Asia-Pacific Association for the Study of Liver and the European Association for the Study of Liver - Chronic Liver Failure consortium, are different and appear to identify different set of patients. Because of limited data on these definitions, the World Gastroenterology Organization working party has proposed a new definition to identify patients from whom data can be collected to ultimately arrive at a uniform definition.