The natural history of non-alcoholic cirrhosis

To assess the natural history of non-alcoholic liver cirrhosis, one hundred and eighty medically treated Japanese cases, including 110 accompanied by esophageal varices were investigated retrospectively. Among those patients with varices fifty-one (46.4%) bled from the upper gastrointestinal (GI) tract and thirty-two (29.1%) from esophageal varices, while GI bleeding was found in only six out of 70 patients without varices. The GI bleeding rate was the highest in patients with varices and concomitant hepatoma (76.5%). The mortality rate of the GI bleeders was 68.6% in patients with varices and 33.3% in patients without varices. The mortality on the first variceal bleeding episode was 65.6%, and another 25.0% had rebleeding from varices, resulting in a one-year survival of 9.4%. The ten-year cumulative percentage of variceal bleeding was 61.2% in patients with varices, and that of occurrence of hepatoma was 50.7% in total of 180 patients. This study revealed that the non-alcoholic cirrhotic patients have a highly rate of complication by hepatoma and that the development of hepatoma doubles the risk of varix rupture.