The immunology of primary sclerosing cholangitis

✍ Scribed by Chapman, R.W.

• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 1990
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 494 KB
• Volume: 12
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0344-4325
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00192687

✦ Synopsis

Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis

Primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC) is a chronic cholestatic liver disease which is characterised by an obliterative inflammatory fibrosis which usually involves the whole biliary tree. Less commonly, the changes may be localised to either the extra or intrahepatic bile ducts and the degree of involvement of the different parts of the biliary tract varies considerably from patient to patient. For over one hundred years since the first description by Hoffman in 1887 it has been considered a rare disease [20] but the advent of improved cholangiographic techniques such as endoscopic retrograde cholangio pancreatography (ERCP) has enabled the diagnosis of PSC to be made without resort to laparotomy. This has resulted in a diagnosis of a much larger number of cases of sclerosing cholangitis and the realisation that it has a much wider clinical and pathological spectrum than was previously recognised [9,19,44].