• Southern medical journal · Feb 2002

    Liver enzymes as predictors of liver damage due to blunt abdominal trauma in children.

    • Subhash R Puranik, Janice S Hayes, Julie Long, and Maria Mata.
    • Division of Trauma Services, Broward General Medical Center, Fort Lauderdale, FL, USA.
    • South. Med. J. 2002 Feb 1;95(2):203-6.

    BackgroundBlunt abdominal trauma in children can result in injury to the liver. In hemodynamically stable patients, initial evaluation of liver transaminase levels may be useful in determining the need for computed tomography (CT).MethodsWe reviewed the medical records of 44 hemodynamically stable children who had abdominal CT and who also had liver enzyme determinations as the initial workup.ResultsLiver enzymes were found to be elevated in all but one patient with CT confirmed hepatic injury. The sensitivity and specificity of elevated liver enzyme levels were 92.9% and 100%, respectively, for predicting liver injury.ConclusionWhen hemodynamically stable pediatric patients with blunt abdominal trauma have AST levels >400 and/or ALT levels >250 IU/L, abdominal CT is indicated. Children in this study with serum transaminase levels below these values were at decreased risk of liver injury.

      Pubmed     Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…