Diagnosis and Assessment of Bleeding Tendency in Chronic Liver Failure Using Three Simple Coagulation Tests

Abstract

Three simple one-stage coagulation screening tests have been performed on the same samples of plasma from 65 patients with chronic liver failure of mixed aetiology.The mean values of the kaolin-activated partial thromboplastin time, prothrombin time, and prothrombin and proconvertin time ('PsrP' test) were all significantly different from normal, but the alteration was more marked for the last test than the first two (80 % of cases with the prothrombin and proconvertin time compared with about 60 % for the other two tests). The prothrombin and proconvertin time was also a better indication of a tendency to bleed than the other two tests.

Coagulation Abnormalities in Liver Disease

“…Normotest and antithrombin III have similar sensitivity in liver cirrhosis, but antithrombin III assay was found superior in chronic hepatitis and for detecting moderate hepatic failure [70]. Both normotest and antithrombin III discriminate better between normals and patients with liver disease [65,71] than albumin and cholinesterase.…”

“…Some relationships were observed between clotting tests and the galactose tolerance test [107,109]. The studies trying to relate clotting tests to bromsulfalein retention yielded equivocal results [19,52,70,71,107,109].…”