Diagnostic and Prognostic Markers in Liver Cirrhosis

Liver cirrhosis is the final stage of all chronic liver diseases. Although cirrhosis is a pathological concept, the diagnosis of this entity is frequently based on clinical criteria that mainly reflect the consequences of increased portal pressure. Once the diagnosis of liver cirrhosis is performed, the time to reach a clinical situation of end-stage liver disease and a need for liver transplantation might be quite long. In this process, patients progress from a compensated phase with no clinical complications to a decompensated phase, in which patients present the main clinical events in liver cirrhosis: variceal bleeding, ascites and renal failure, encephalopathy, and hepatocellular carcinoma. This Special Issue of Disease Markers is dedicated to explore in eight chapters the importance of diagnostic tools and the role of different prognostic markers in the different stages and clinical complications of liver cirrhosis. The current knowledge is reviewed by eight selected invited groups of experts in the field. In the first review, Albillos and Garcı́a-Tsao (Classification of cirrhosis: The clinical use of HVPG measurements) examine the prognostic importance of portal hypertension in liver cirrhosis and propose several stages in cirrhosis based on the degree of portal hypertension and the presence of the clinical complications, indicating also practical aspects of the technique