Drug-induced liver injury: A primer for cardiologists

Abstract

Although drug-induced liver injury (DILI) is an uncommon diagnosis, it is an important cause of morbidity and mortality in hepatology practice. A timely diagnosis of DILI is important to stop causative drugs and keeping a high index of suspicion is important. There is no gold standard single test to diagnosed DILI, causality scores help in establishing a diagnosis. DILI presenting as acute liver failure is associated with poor prognosis in natural course. The association of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease with cardiac disease makes it more important to think of DILI in a patient with liver dysfunction. We discuss various aspects of DILI in cardiology context in the current review.

Keywords

• cardiac medicines
• causality
• drug-induced liver injury
• prognosis
• statins