The impact of outpatient clinical care on the survival and hospitalisation rate in patients with alcoholic liver cirrhosis
Article Category: Research Article
Published Online: Dec 07, 2017
Page range: 75 - 82
Received: Sep 11, 2017
Accepted: Oct 15, 2017
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/raon-2017-0056
© 2018 Dejan Majc, Bojan Tepes
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Background
In the study, we aimed to determine whether regular outpatient controls in patients with alcoholic liver cirrhosis have an impact on their survival and hospitalisation rates.
Patients and methods
We included patients with liver cirrhosis and regular outpatient controls as a prospective study group and patients with liver cirrhosis who were admitted to hospital only in cases of complications as a retrospective control group. The study was conducted between 2006 and 2011.
Results
We included 98 patients in the study group and 101 patients in the control group. There were more outpatient controls in the study group than in the control group (5.54 examinations vs. 2.27 examinations, p = 0.000). Patients in the study group had 25 fewer hospitalisations (10.2%; p = 0.612). The median survival rate was 4.6 years in the study group and 2.9 years in the control group (p = 0.021). Patients with Child A classification had an average survival of one year longer in the study group (p = 0.035). No significant difference was found for Child B patients. Patients with Child C classification had longer survival by 1.6 years in the study group (p = 0.006). Alcohol consumption was lower in the study group than in the control group (p = 0.018).
Conclusions
We confirmed that patients with regular outpatient controls had lower alcohol consumption, a lower hospitalisation rate and significantly prolonged survival time. We confirmed the necessity for the establishment of regular outpatient controls in patients with alcoholic liver cirrhosis.