Drug hepatotoxicity

Drug-induced liver disease is a relatively common, but often unrecognized, cause of liver injury, primarily because the diagnosis is often not entertained clinically. In addition, drugs are great imitators, capable of producing nearly any clinical scenario and histopathologic lesion. Thus, when dealing with a liver biopsy from a patient with an undiagnosed liver disease, the diagnosis of drug hepatotoxicity is made by first having a high index of suspicion, and then by careful correlation of histopathologic findings with both clinical and laboratory data and with a search for appropriate precedents in the medical literature.