Branched-chain amino acids for hepatic encephalopathy?

✍ Scribed by Christian Gluud; Harold O. Conn; L. S. Eriksson

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1991
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 164 KB
• Volume: 13
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0270-9139
• DOI: 10.1002/hep.1840130438

✦ Synopsis

After careful analysis of the literature, Eriksson and Conn (1) concluded that branched-chain amino acid (BCAA) therapy does not appear to significantly affect the prognosis of patients with acute hepatic encephalopathy (HE). In a metanalysis of almost the same studies, Naylor et al. (2) reached the conclusion that BCAA significantly reduced the mortality rate. DerSimonian (3), in commenting on the discrepancy, pointed out some of the pitfalls in metanalysis when different data from the same trials are examined. However, it may be hard for physicians to tell from her analysis whether one shouId accept the conclusions of Eriksson and Conn or of Naylor et al. Furthermore, DerSimonian did not include the results of the most recently published double-blind randomized controlled clinical trial on BCAA treatment of HE (4).

Table 1 represents a metanalysis of the mortality data extracted by Eriksson and Conn (1) from previous studies (5)(6)(7)(8) plus the data recently published by our group