Thursday, October 13, 2005

Hepatoadrenal syndrome

This paper in Critical Care Medicine is noteworthy because it demonstrates an unexpectedly high rate of adrenal insufficiency in patients with severe acute and chronic liver failure, and suggests that treatment with hydrocortisone improves outcome in those patients demonstrated to have adrenal insufficiency. Perhaps we should be doing rapid cortrosyn stimulation tests on these patients at hospital admission. This is useful information with the potential to change hospital practice.

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