Acute Liver Failure 

If the liver is diseased, then eventually symptoms will appear. However, in some cases these signs of liver disease will be severe shortly after the first diagnosis. This is considered to be acute liver failure and it is technically when severe complications are experienced only a week to four weeks after the appearance of the first liver disease symptoms. If this happens, there are also implications as to how the disease is progressing, the possible outcomes and how it should be treated.  

There are many possible causes of acute liver failure. The most common reasons behind acute symptoms of liver failure are an overdose of paracetamol or acetaminophen, reaction to a certain medication, alcoholism or excessive drinking of alcohol and hepatitis type A or B.  During pregnancy a fatty liver may cause acute failure and also Reye’s syndrome is seen in acute cases of liver failure in children that have been given aspirin or are suffering from a virus infection. In rarer cases there may be a hereditary factor. Quite often there is also simply no reason behind the acute liver failure.  

There are many symptoms of acute liver failure, such as jaundice, easy bruising or bleeding, fatigue and general deterioration of health. These can all be mistaken for other diseases and conditions so it is important to have the right diagnosis. Since the cause may be the main factor, there are many ways of evaluating a person. A patient that may have an acute case of liver failure will be tested for ammonia, HIV, pregnancy, hepatitis, blood count and undergo toxicology and chemistry tests. These tests check out the liver enzymes, glucose, presence of paracetamol and amount of things like potassium, sodium and magnesium.  

Once acute liver failure has been determined, it is important to get treatment immediately so that other problems don’t happen as a result of the liver condition. There are many things that can happen and acute liver failure also has a high fatality rate. The best methods for treating this condition are proper nutrition, balancing fluids, dialysis and in cases of patients that don’t respond to other treatment, a liver transplant.