Background and aim: The liver cirrhosis is a global public health problem with an estimated prevalence of 0.27%, and a prevalence of chronic liver disease in the Latin American population of 61.1%. The lysosomal acid lipase (LAL) is an enzyme involved in the last steps of lipid metabolism to hydrolyzeesters of cholesterol and triacylglyceride, therefore its deficiency generates a disease by lysosomal deposit. The patients with cryptogenic cirrhosis (CC) presents a clear LAL deficiency without a mechanism yet established.
Material and methods: The present study has a retrospective and analytical design of a sample of 55 patients diagnosed with CC. It was determined the degree of association of LAL with the results of the ALT and ALP enzymes, likewise with the clinical manifestation of portal hypertension (PH). Next the sensibility and specificity of the test for the diagnosis of PH manifestation was determined.
Results: The most frequent complication of PH was the variceal bleeding with a 40% (n=22), followed by ascites with 32.7% (n=18) and lastly hepatic encephalopathy with 18.2% (n=10). The association by test of x2 with Fisher's test did not present a statistically significant association with values of 0.177, 0.299 and 0.184 for encephalopathy, variceal bleeding and ascites respectively. Through ROC curves it was obtain results of area under the curve (AUROC) near to 0.5.
Conclusions: It is established that there was no tendency or statistical significance of the correlation between LAL with the enzymes alanine aminotransferase and alkaline phosphatase, as well as the complications of portal hypertension. In our population the complication of portal hypertension most frequent was the variceal bleeding, unlike other studies in patients with cryptogenic cirrhosis, so it would be important to recognize which are the risk factors that increases the bleeding rate in our population, since this complication is consider the one with the highest mortality in patients with liver cirrhosis.
Conflicts of interest: The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.
