Prevalence of hyponatremia in chronic liver disease patients and it's correlation with the severity of the disease.

Hyponatremia has been most common electrolyte abnormality found among the patients with advanced cirrhosis indicating a poor prognosis. Hyponatremia is noted to be a marker of the severity of cirrhosis. However, there are limited studies conducted on this in the current study setting and hence the current study was conducted to estimate the prevalence of hyponatremia in chronic liver disease patients and to assess the correlation of hyponatremia with the severity of the chronic liver disease. This was an observational study conducted among 100 chronic liver disease patients admitted in a tertiary care hospital. The socio-demographic data, clinical history and details about the risk factors of CLD were collected using a semi-structured questionnaire by interview method. Blood investigations were performed along with upper GI endoscopy. Severity of cirrhosis was assessed according to Child-Pugh score. Data were analyzed using SPSS version 18.0. A P value of < 0.05 was considered statistically significant. The mean age of the study subjects was 45.19±10.01 years and 92.0% were males. The prevalence of hyponatremia was 75.0% at the cut off of ≤135 mEq/L and it was 52.0% at the cut off of ≤130 mEq/L. Higher proportions of those with moderately impaired hepatic function and advanced hepatic dysfunction (class B/ Class C) had hyponatremia compared to those without hyponatremia (76.6% vs 50.0%) but it was not statistically significant (P>0.05). Significantly higher proportions of those with hyponatremia had hepatic encephalopathy (85.4%) compared to those with no hyponatremia (67.8%) (P<0.05). The prevalence of hyponatremia was noted to be 75.0% but the severity as per Child-Pugh score had no association with hyponatremia. However, hepatic encephalopathy was significantly associated with hyponatremia.

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© Journal of the Association of Physicians of India 2011.