Clinical data analysis of patients with drug and dietary supplement induced liver injury in Latvia

Abstract

Drug-induced liver injury (DILI) is a rare adverse reaction to medications or herbal and dietary supplements (HDS). Several studies have shown an increase in incidence over the last decades with a disproportionate higher increase in cases connected to HDS. Even though DILI is very rare, it is one of the leading causes of acute liver failure (ALF). The pathogenesis is not entirely understood, and specific diagnostic markers are not available yet. This together with the vast number of etiologic agents and variable presentations makes diagnosing DILI challenging. The aim of this study was to determine the demographic and clinical features, the most common causal agents in Latvia, the resulting liver injury patterns, and their relationships to its severity, to improve the understanding of the disease. This analysis was a retrospective study on patients diagnosed with DILI at the hepatology department of the Latvian Infectiology Center from 2014 to 2017. Among the 128 included patients 58.6% were women, and the mean age was 54 years. In 52 cases a single drug was implicated (40.6%), in 28 cases HDS (21.9%), and in 48 cases multiple agents were suspected (37.5%). Antimicrobials were the most frequently implicated class of drugs, and the most frequent HDS were multivitamin and herbal combinations. The proportion of HDS-induced injury increased from 17.9% in 2014 to 25% in 2017; these patients had fewer comorbidities ( p = 0.044), men were younger and had even fewer comorbidities than women. These findings call for more regulation and testing of freely available HDS. The main injury pattern was hepatocellular in 78 cases (66.7%), 19 cases showed a mixed pattern (16.25), and 20 cases were cholestatic (17.1%). The liver injury patterns of several etiologic agents differed from those described as their “signature” patterns found in the literature, questioning their validity. Risk factors for severe liver injury were a high number of comorbidities ( p = 0.041), underlying chronic liver disease ( p = 0.028), hypersensitivity reaction ( p = 0.017), male gender ( p = 0.050), and possibly diabetes mellitus ( p = 0.389).