Basic Hepatitis

Hepatitis basically means there's a kind of swelling (inflammation) in your liver. Normally this is due to infections from various types of viruses around. Their 2 basic types of hepatitis that everybody should learn by heart are :

1) enteral hepatitis - this means hepatitis resulted from the gastrointestinal tract pathway (or in simpler terms, it spreads through our food and anything that can pass through our mouth and into our stomach). Hepatitis A and Hepatitis E spreads via this pathway.

2) parenteral hepatitis - this hepatitis spreads via blood. Normally, this kind of hepatitis are as result from contamination of surgical equipments during surgery or it can be as small as a needle point contaminated,and even that can result infection to the patients. Hepatitis B,D.C and G are spread via this pathway.

Prominent clinical features of patients with hepatitis are:

1) Fever - After a period of incubation, patient will have increased temperature, vomitting, nausea and feeling very lethargic. Together these symptoms are called the intoxication syndrome. This normally proceed when patients are infected to bacterias or viruses.

2) Jaundice -Patients will have a period of jaundice. Jaundice basically means 'turning yellow'. Look for yellow-ness of the scalp, white part of the eyes, or if the patient is black, make sure to take a good look at their palms for yellow-ness.

3) Brown Urine & White Faeces - Patient with jaundice would have brown urine and white faeces. Normally, the urine is yellow because of a substance called urobilin (which will be discussed later). In hepatitis patient, the urine will take place the colour of faeces, so it will become brown and the faeces are without them,so they are white in colour.

4) Liver and Spleen Enlargement - In 4 to 6 days, liver and spleen become large. The sequence goes like this, first the viral infection to the liver takes place, then the spleen would respond with it's immunity against the infection,hence they increase in size. Increasing in size means spleen will overwork,hence will even more filter the red blood cells, this will later result in jaundice because the spleen is over-degrading the red blood cells,producing so many bilirubin that flows within vessels in our body.

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