Different Causes of Liver Disease in Sri Lanka

Scientific Essay from the year 2017 in the subject Biology - Diseases, Health, Nutrition, , language: English, abstract: Liver disease is one of the main causes for deaths in Sri Lanka, this is the second most common disease causing deaths in hospitals in Sri Lanka after the heart disease. Sri Lanka ranks eighty-nine (89) in the world rankings for liver disease causing 3349 deaths according to the data published by the World Health Organization (WHO) for the 2014 calendar year and an average of 15.28 deaths per hundred thousand. The two most common forms of this disease is non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and alcoholic fatty liver disease. The data collected by the WHO is analyzed and the different causes for the liver disease is identified between the period of 1980-2010, using the different factors responsible for the cause of the disease data is distinguished. Of the data collected and analyzed most causes of liver disease in Sri Lanka is due to the non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) or alcoholic fatty liver disease which leads to severe complications such as renal failure, liver cirrhosis and eventually death. Liver disease is one of the most prominent disease which causes millions of deaths around the world. Sri Lanka has shown vast number of cases develop over the past decades in which the disease has caused several deaths among people, the most common types being non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, alcoholic fatty liver disease, hepatitis A, herbal medicine and toxins and liver disease due to dengue infection (Wijewantha, 2017). According to the data published by the WHO in 2010 for the number of deaths caused by liver disease caused by intake of alcohol is 57% for males among a hundred thousand and 37.7% in females, this percentage highlights the main cause of alcoholic fatty liver disease which leads to the severe form of liver cirrhosis. The number of deaths from liver cirrhosis from different forms of liver disease has increased severely from 1047 in 1980 to 3415 in 2010, which shows an increase of 330% in the span of 30 years. Sri Lanka had the second highest percentage change for liver cirrhosis mortality from 1990 to 2010 where 80.4% increase was visible (Mokdad,2014). Liver cirrhosis is one of the major problems which has increased the prevalence of increasing mortality. 20% of the world population are suffered by the NAFLD and 10% of the population causes AFLD.