Hello and welcome to the zero to finals podcast.

My name is Tom and in this episode I'm going to be talking to you about hepatitis,

particularly viral hepatitis and autoimmune hepatitis.

If you want to follow along with written notes on this topic,

you can follow along at zero to finals.com slash hepatitis or in the gastroenterology section of the zero to finals medicine

book. So let's get straight into it. The word hepatitis basically describes inflammation of

the liver, and this can vary from chronic low-level inflammation to acute and

severe inflammation that leads to large areas of necrosis of liver tissue and liver failure.

So the causes of hepatitis can be alcoholic hepatitis, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease that progresses to hepatitis,

viral hepatitis which we're going to go through here, autoimmune hepatitis, which we're also

going to go through here, and drug-induced hepatitis, for example, in paracetamore overdose.

How do patients with hepatitis present?

Well, hepatitis can vary from being completely asymptomatic

or it could present with non-specific symptoms,

things like abdominal pain, fatigue, pruritus, which is itching all over the body, muscle and joint aches, nausean

vomiting, jaundice, which is that yellow discoloration that the skin goes when there's a very

high bilirubin level, and fever, which you might get with viral hepatitis.

Typical biochemical findings when you do a blood test,

on the liver function test, they'll become deranged,

with high transaminases particularly,

things like AST and ALT,

with proportionately less of a rise in ALP or alkaline phosphatase.

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