Noninvasive Tests to Predict the Presence of Esophageal Varices in Patients With Liver Cirrhosis

Liver cirrhosis is caused by chronic liver diseases, varices exist in 30 - 60% of patients with liver cirrhosis. Variceal bleeding is one of the most important complications of cirrhosis, accelerating the progression of decompensation to a stage at which the patient is at an extremely high risk of death. Endoscopy is the gold standard for the diagnosis of varices, However, periodic endoscopic screening in all cirrhotic patients might unnecessarily induce an invasive and expensive procedure, ultimately increasing not only the medical workload of endoscopy units, but also the financial burden of patients. To avoid unnecessary endoscopy in low- risk patients, some simple, non-invasive and accurate tests have been developed to identify EVs. Such as Transient elastography (TE) , which is a noninvasive tool that measures liver stiffness (LS) correlating to liver fibrosis stage. Moreover, the LS-spleen size-to-platelet ratio score (LSPS), which is a combination of three simple examination methods (LS, spleen size and platelet count) has been established to accurately predict EVs in patients with cirrhosis. Therefore, investigators design this cross-sectional study to assess these non-invasive tests in predicting the presence of EVs in patients with cirrhosis.