Sampa Choudhury
BACKGROUND
Liver is the site for wide spectrum of diseases, primary as well secondary, which maybe symptomatic or silent and incidentally diagnosed during routine investigation or autopsy examination. The main purpose of our study was to identify different spectrum of histopathological findings of liver in medical autopsies.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
The study was conducted in the Department of Pathology, Regional Institute of Medical Sciences (RIMS), Imphal. All the consecutive liver specimens dissected out during medical autopsy and postmortem were included in the study. Detailed clinical information including age and sex were obtained. All the liver specimens were examined meticulously and the gross findings were noted down. Histopathological slides were prepared from the representative areas and findings recorded.
RESULTS
In the present study, a total of 330 liver specimens were examined from medical autopsies during the period of 5 years. Among them, 39 cases were autolysed and remaining 291 cases were analysed grossly and histologically. 249 (85.5%) cases were males and 42 (14.4%) cases were females. 71 (24.39%) cases had no obvious pathology, followed by fatty liver (20.96%), portal triaditis (18.55%), cirrhosis (14.08%), hepatitis (11.34%) and steatohepatitis (5.15%). Other important cases like liver necrosis (2.40%), granulomatous lesion (0.68%), tuberculosis (0.68%), chronic venous congestion (0.68%), malaria pigment (0.34%), leukaemic infiltration (0.34%) and bile duct hamartoma (0.34%). Fatty liver and cirrhosis was found to be most common in the age group of 41-50 years with male predominance. Incidentally, diagnosed liver diseases are not uncommon in medical autopsy.
CONCLUSION
We concluded that the autopsy examination of liver is very helpful to identify silent liver diseases as it is very common in apparently healthy individuals.This data may be utilised for a medical audit.
