Drug-induced hepatitis
With the development of clinical new drugs, drug-induced hepatitis becomes a more significant problem and almost 1000 kinds of drugs are involved. Patients with drug-induced hepatitis account for 10% in the clinical hepatitis patients and the patients over 50 years old are more than 40%. In the 21st century, there are nearly 30 thousands kinds of drugs for human using people are in the threat made by over 60 thousands kinds of chemicals while coupled with food additive and environmental pollutants. That is to say, taking medicines may induce hepatitis. Whenever hepatitis is mentioned, people would think of hepatitis A, B or C, in fact, there still the others in hepatitis family, such as, alcoholic hepatitis, autoimmune hepatitis and drug-induced hepatitis etc. while drug-induced hepatitis can be the most serious one often aroused people’s a few attentions and still with a large number.
Drug-induced hepatitis concludes two types: the acute one and the chronic one. However, the critical patients may have fluminant hepatic failure and a large number of hepatocyte necrosis all of a sudden, finally, patients may die within one to two weeks. Drug-induced hepatitis is not only directly caused by the toxicity of drugs themselves, but also can be caused by the liver damages of allergic reaction (immune mechanism). Drug-induced hepatitis always has a latency period of two to eight weeks and often with symptoms of fever, jaundice, eruption or pruritus in early stage.
Reminding: Patients with chronic hepatitis must guard against over-medication, obey doctors' advice and took proper medicine on schedule. A vast majority of patients could get recovery if they stop using relevant medicines in time when finding the liver is damaged, few drug-induced hepatitis may develop chronic hepatitis.
