Correlation of serum ammonia with grades of hepatic encephalopathy

Background: Affected patients exhibit alterations in psychomotor, intellectual, cognitive, emotional, behavioural and fine motor functions. Hepatic encephalopathy occurs as a complication of advance liver disease, either chronic or acute.Methods: 58 patients of hepatic encephalopathy was enrolled in our study which was done in Chhatrapati Shivagi Subharti hospital for the duration of 2 years to look for the correlation of grades of hepatic encephalopathy with serum ammonia levels.Results: In this study, the correlation of serum ammonia was significant with the grade of encephalopathy hence, the serum ammonia correlated well with the grade of encephalopathy for the patients during their hospital stay, suggesting that the serum ammonia level was an indicator of the clinical outcome of the patients during their hospital stay.Conclusions: In this study, we found that there is a strong correlation between serum ammonia level and severity of liver disease. Higher serum ammonia was found in severe liver disease. We found that High grade i.e. grade III and IV patients were having significantly raised ammonia level.