Frequency of Positive Fecal Occult Blood Test in Patients with Cirrhosis
Keywords:
Positive, Fecal Occult Blood Test, CirrhosisAbstract
OBJECTIVES
The objective of this study is to determine the frequency of positive fecal occult blood tests in patients with cirrhosis.
METHODOLOGY
This descriptive cross-sectional study had a total of 154 patients observed for six months i.e., from 12/3/2023 to 12/9/2023 in the Department of Medicine, Khyber Teaching Hospital, Peshawar. Patients (aged 18-70 years) were worked up with detailed history and clinical examination to reveal ascites, coagulopathy, jaundice, splenomegaly, cachexia, and gynecomastia. After having excluded the confounders, a morning fecal sample was taken under aseptic conditions in a specialized fecal occult blood testing kit and sent for laboratory evaluation for interpretation. The sampling technique was consecutive non-probability. All investigations were done from the same laboratory and under the supervision of a hematologist with three years of fellowship experience. Data was stored and analyzed by the statistical program IBM-SPSS version 22. Frequencies and percentages were calculated for qualitative variables like gender, child-pugh class for cirrhosis, and positive fecal occult blood test. Post-stratification was done through a chi-square test and p-values <0.05 were considered as significant.
RESULTS
In this study, the mean age was 57 years with SD ± 11.27. Sixty-two percent of patients were males while 38% of patients were females. The mean duration of the disease was 1 year with SD ± 3.57. More than 37% of patients had a positive fecal occult blood test while 63% of patients had a negative fecal occult blood test.
CONCLUSION
Our study shows that the frequency of positive fecal occult blood tests was 37% in patients with cirrhosis.
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Copyright (c) 2024 Faisal Khan, Aliena Badshah, Durkho Atif, Muhammad Irshad
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