Coexistence of hepatic and pancreatic disease in the chronic alcoholic. Unusual or frequent situation?

Abstract

In all that has been written there is still some controversy about the importance of the simultaneous pathologycal involvement (functional and/or morphologic) of the pancreas and liver on the same alcoholic patient. Thus, and with the intention of reaching an agreement on the matter, we studied on one hand, on a functional basis, the exocrine pancreas in a group of alcoholic cirrhotics (n = 75) and, on the other, we analysed on a triple perspective--clinical, biological and anatomic-pathological--the pathological involvement of the liver in a series of cases (n = 20) with chronic calcifying pancreatitis. In such case, we verified that, essentially, the secretory capacity of the pancreas had diminished in 17.3% of the cirrhotic cases, while on the other hand, the clinical-laboratorial and anatomic-pathological analysis of liver on pancreatic patients showed clinical-biological suspicion of alcoholic hepatic disease, serious lesions considered pre-cirrhotic and established cirrhosis, respectively in 56.2%, 12.5% and 6.2% of the cases. We conclude that, although the idea of rarity in associating hepatic cirrhosis with chronic pancreatitis, came through on the clinical-symptomatological observation plan, certain investigations of functional and/or histopathological nature, run by us on alcoholic patients, proved to suffer from these affections, permitted us to indicate that the coexistence of pathological involvement of these two organs should not be underestimated.