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Filed under Tyrosinemia

This is the end of the story, of the little boy you saw at the beginning with tyrosinemia. Here he is – I must add, three transplants later – and here’s his brother. Both children had hereditary tyrosinemia, both transplanted, both doing very nicely.
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Biliary Atresia. Here is your classic very yellow little baby; great big belly, obviously jaundiced, obviously has ascites. You can probably sense that the little arms and legs are kind of skinny. Sleepy, sick-looking child. This little girl had biliary atresia and was awaiting transplant at the time of this picture. Which brings us to the most common cause of obstructive jaundice beyond the neonatal period, which is biliary atresia. It occurs about 1:10,000, maybe up to 1:14,000. It presents, generally speaking, in full term babies and it’s a conjugated hyperbilirubinemia occurring within the first four weeks of life. And I really can’t stress this enough. It is truly amazing to me that many of the children that we eventually see here are not diagnosed early. The reason being is that people will do a total bilirubin as a screening test, and will not – after the first two weeks of life – bother to fractionate it. If there is only one thing that you get out of this afternoon’s talk, if you see a child after two weeks of age that’s yellow, you must get a fractionated bilirubin because otherwise you are going to miss children with conjugated hyperbilirubinemia that have biliary atresia who could potentially have procedures that would gain them a considerable amount of life expectancy.
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In the classic form, there is complete atresia of the external biliary system, leads on to fibrosis, eventually cirrhosis and all the ravages of end-stage liver disease. Now without that biliary drainage procedure, which is what you want to do before two months of age, these children will inevitably die within the first one or two years of life. As I’ve said, early diagnosis is essential. I’ve already made the big point about conjugated hyperbilirubinemia. When you do the biliary drainage procedure, the so-called Kasai procedure, and you do it at the right time – less than three months of age – you are generally going to buy some time for that child. If the diagnosis is late and you start trying to do these drainage procedures beyond three months of age, less than a quarter of those children will have any benefit at all from the surgery. And they follow a progressive downhill course. Even with biliary drainage performed at a good time, eventually about three-quarters of the children with biliary atresia will eventually require a new liver. Some of them within the first months or years of life, some of them will go even out into their teenage years. And the progression of this disease is highly variable. Interestingly, even when you do do the biliary drainage procedure, the cirrhosis problem can continue to develop as the child gets older and they may present to you perhaps at 11 or 12-years-of-age without jaundice but with portal hypertension and bleeding. This is because of the cirrhosis. The biliary drainage procedures worked but the cirrhosis is ongoing. What tells you that the biliary drainage procedure has failed? Well, the first thing that is the tip-off is that these children get recurrent cholangitis. The jaundice comes back, they get fevers and then they start developing all the problems of chronic liver disease; portal hypertension and cirrhosis.

Comments (0) Posted by Canadian Pharmacy on Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

Filed under Tyrosinemia

The treatment, particularly if you are savvy and you make this diagnosis early, is immunosuppression. The mainstay is still steroids. You might add 6-MP, azathioprine or even some of the newer immunosuppressants to try and control the process. You have to remember that autoimmune diseases, no matter which one it is, are multi-system diseases so whether the presentation is in the liver or somewhere else, you should look at the joints, you look for funny rashes, you look for ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease, diabetes, thyroid problems. So don’t just stop at the liver. Make sure you have really carefully gone through all the other systems that could be involved.
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Now what about chronic hepatitis that we cause? Well, there is a group of babies who are born, for various reasons, with short-gut syndrome with inability to be enterally fed who find themselves long-term on parenteral nutrition. And this is quite an important cause of chronic liver disease in these children. We are really not totally clear on the etiology but we do know that a chronic inflammatory process begins, progressing to fibrosis and then to cirrhosis. Typically it’s in the neonates who cannot tolerate enteral feedings right from the get-go. So the more enteral feedings you can somehow or another get into these babies the more likely you are to protect their liver. We now see, unfortunately, more and more children referred to us who have short-gut syndrome whose livers have now gone into end-stage liver disease and who require a combined liver and intestinal transplant, if they have any hope of survival.
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Then of course when you get to a lecture like this there are always the ones that we don’t understand. The so-called cryptogenics. This is probably a very interesting group of diseases and we are just not smart enough to know what they are. Probably some of them are autoimmune. We don’t know clearly what causes them but what we do know is that they can go all the way to end-stage liver disease and you find yourself transplanting a child and you have to say to the parents, “Well, we know your child needs a liver transplant but we don’t know what caused it.” So this is a whole area that is open for new enlightenment.
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Comments (0) Posted by Canadian Pharmacy on Monday, October 19th, 2009

Filed under Tyrosinemia

The treatment for Wilson’s disease depends on when your diagnose is, which is why early diagnosis is essential. If there is no cirrhosis you are going to treat these patients with chelating agents, like penicillamine. However, if fully developed cirrhosis has already occurred, or they are presenting to you in fulminant liver failure, you have no other option but liver transplantation. There is another reason why diagnosis is so very important, because once you identify the index case you’ve got to screen those family members because you may be sitting on an asymptomatic sibling who you can treat very successfully with chelating agents, even if the index case is quite sick when you see them the first time.
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Autoimmune disease in children. Well, it’s probably more common than we think. Typically we think of this as a disease affecting adolescent females but we have seen it in boys, we have seen it in little children, even as young as two or sometimes even less. Presentation, again, highly variable. They may turn up with chronic liver disease and all the characteristic usual associations; cirrhosis, portal hypertension. But where we sometimes see it, and it’s very bothersome when it occurs this way, as a cause of actual fulminant liver failure in sub-acute kind of presentation. Some of these little ones will need liver transplantation very rapidly.

The diagnostic clue is that if you look at the proteins in the blood, the total serum protein is going to be high and the serum albumin is going to be low and the reason for that is that there is a hypergammaglobulinemia. So if you see a low serum albumin, a high total protein and you are beginning to think about chronic liver disease, it might make you think about autoimmune.
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Then there is a whole array of diagnostic markers that I am not going to delineate for you; anti-smooth muscle, anti-mitochondrial antibodies, anti-liver-kidney microsomal. You can think about just about any antibody you want to and look for it as part of the way that you prove your diagnosis. Along, of course, with liver biopsy.

Comments (0) Posted by Canadian Pharmacy on Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

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Cystic fibrosis. You normally think about this as being a disease involving the lungs. Interestingly, cirrhosis with portal hypertension can occur in cystic fibrosis, generally presenting in mid or older age children. Sometimes the liver disease is much more important than the lung disease in these children, and they may also present with portal hypertension and already developed cirrhosis. If they’ve got portal hypertension, you try to shunt some of these children if they are big enough, because of course we are very worried about transplanting children who may already have chronic lung disease and all the problems of immunosuppression and chronic lung disease together might cause.
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Wilson’s disease. You might only see one in your life but you sure don’t want to miss it. This is a disease which is marked by defective copper metabolism. You wind up with far too much copper in your liver, your central nervous system, and also in the kidney. The liver and the central nervous system are the two that really present to you most often, in terms of clinical symptoms. Now on the lab tests, what are you going to see? The serum copper is low and the serum ceruloplasmin, which is the carrier protein, is low. You are going to do a 24 hour urine copper. That’s going to be really high. And you are going to have your local, friendly hepatologist do a liver biopsy and you will note that the liver copper content is quite elevated, and that’s the diagnostic test. So if you are worried about Wilson’s disease, get someone to do a liver biopsy on that child.
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The presentation can be all over the map. It can present as acute fulminant hepatitis. If it does, the tip-off is that these children have acute hemolytic anemia in association with their fulminant liver failure. If you see that combination, think Wilson’s disease until proven otherwise. They may present as a chronic active hepatitis, cirrhosis, portal hypertension, variceal bleeding. They may be totally asymptomatic with just a moderately elevated transaminitis. Some of these children do present with the neurologic symptoms more than the liver symptoms and they can be very subtle. Changes in personality, school performance, behavior characteristics that the parents come in and say, “This just isn’t anything like the child I used to know.” Be very aware of that. The Kayser-Fleischer rings, the brown pigment around the iris, is always talked about in the books. Very difficult to see and you usually are not going to see it until the mid-teenage years.
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Comments (0) Posted by Canadian Pharmacy on Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

Filed under Tyrosinemia

Tyrosinemia is an autosomal recessive disease. In infancy it is a fulminant presentation. In childhood, a chronic presentation. A very important thing about tyrosinemia in children is its association with hepatocellular carcinoma. Twenty-seven percent of children by their second birthday will already have HCC. So that’s why you really have to transplant these children, generally speaking, before the age of two in order to avoid this devastating complication. The other two systems that are involved are the central nervous system – neurologic crises, which can actually look like acute porphyria can occur – and renal impairment is also common. Making the diagnosis, we talked about. You measure the succinylacetone in the urine. In terms of treatment, you manipulate the diet to get rid of the offending precursor proteins and now there is an interesting alternative. A chemical agent, shortened to NTBC, and the importance of this is it actually halts tyrosine degradation so that you don’t form the toxic metabolite, which is succinylacetone. This can actually be very effective, particularly in the infants, but what we don’t think it does is we don’t think it stops the progression to hepatocellular carcinoma. So even though you can buy time for the little children, you probably still – at least as far as we know in 2006 – still have to transplant these little ones before their third birthday.
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Alpha 1-antitrypsin deficiency. Turning away from the infections, the metabolic causes of chronic liver disease in children, by far and away the most common is alpha 1-antitrypsin deficiency. And if you remember, this is, generally speaking, associated with the ZZ phenotype. Occasionally you see it with some of the other phenotypes like MZ, but for purposes of keeping life simple, it’s the ZZ phenotype, generally speaking. As I said before, these children may have presented in infancy with a high bilirubin which completely went away, the diagnosis may never have been made until they come into your office or in to the hospital in childhood and they’ve already developed signs of portal hypertension. Interestingly, the lung disease tends to occur quite late in alpha 1-antitrypsin deficiency, whereas the liver disease will present sometimes quite early. Sometimes the cirrhosis is fully established and portal hypertension with a non-jaundiced child with a big spleen and may be vomiting blood in the emergency room, is the first sign that this child had alpha 1-antitrypsin deficiency all along. Treatment? There really is none. It’s supportive care, if end-stage liver disease is already present, until you can get these children transplanted.
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Comments (0) Posted by Canadian Pharmacy on Monday, October 5th, 2009