Dermatological manifestation in a case analysis of a chronic liver disease in a reference hospital in Belém, Pará State, Brazil

Abstract

Hematopathic patients can often be asymptomatic or may present symptoms in a light or nonspecific way, without clear indicators of a hepatocellular lesion. The skin lesions can be the first or even the only sing of liver disease. This study aims to detect and describe the main skin lesions in series of patients with liver diseases treated at a reference hospital for liver disease in Belém, Pará State, Brazil, from October 2011 to June 2012. Fifty-eight patients were investigated, most of them were female, in the fifth decade of life. Viral hepatitis B and C were the most frequent liver disease and 91.4% of patients had dermatological findings during the investigation, with 40 different types of dermatological diagnoses and grouped into 13 major groups of skin illness. Xerosis was the most common dermatological finding in liver disease (34.5%). Chronic liver diseases are related to a number of extrahepatic manifestations, many of them are cutaneous and may help to identify silent cases of those serious diseases.