الفهرس | Only 14 pages are availabe for public view |
Abstract Serum procollagen type III peptide was believed to reflect synthesis and degradation of type III collagen during fibrogenesis. Accumulation of type III procollagen in the liver and increase of its serum level in some hepatic diseases have been previously recorded. The aim of this work is to evaluate the significance of serum PIlI P assay in inflammatory and fibrogenic activity in children with chronic liver disease and to study the possibility of replacing liver biopsy by simple non invasive serum assay of procollagen III peptide. In this work, 26 patients with chronic liver diseases CLD. were studied. Patients were divided into two groups (according to histopathological examination of liver biopsy) chronic active hepatitic group CAH (13 patients) and chronic persistent hepatitic group CPH (13 patients). Their ages ranged from three to thirteen years, ten healthy subjects were included as a control group. All cases were subjected to full medical history, full clinical examination and liver biopsy. The following investigations were done: Hemoglobin percent, ESR, serum albumin, albumin/globulin, total bilirubin. SGOT, SGPT, 80 alkaline phosphatase, HBs Ag in addition to procollagen III peptide (PII I p) The results of this study showed that serum levels of PIlI P in patients with CAH were significantly higher than the control group (P < 0.001). There was also significant elevation of PIlIP in patients with CPH compared to control group (P < 0.05). Although both patient groups showed significant elevation of PIlI P level than the control group CAH showed a higher elevation than CPH. There was significant elevation of bilirubin, SGOT and SGPT in the two groups of patients as compared to the control group. There was no correlation found between serum PIlI P and liver function tests. from this work we can conclude that Serum PIlI P is a relatively simple, non invasive, dynamic marker for hepatic fibrogenesis and inflammation. However further studies on wide scale in field of chronic liver diseases with different etiologies are needed to estimate serum PIlI P in the same patient during the various stages of the disease. This might help to evaluate the usefulness of serum PIlI P assay in monitoring the disease. |