Background: Liver disease presents as a spectrum of clinically asymptomatic liver disease to end stage liver disease. Various serum markers used in liver diseases but are not specific or sensitive and influenced by other factors. We do a battery of investigations - liver function tests. Liver biopsy is the gold standard investigation, but is invasive. There is a still a search for a non invasive and a better marker for diagnosis of liver diseases. Serum arginase an enzyme of urea cycle gets elevated in liver damage and can be used in diagnosing liver diseases.

Objective: To assess the serum arginase activity and state that it can be a marker of diagnosis of liver disease. To assess the severity of liver disease using serum arginase

Materials and Methods: This was a rural based teaching hospital based cross sectional study of 80 patients with liver diseases. The serum arginase level (by elisa method) in the patients were compared with the novel liver function tests. Also we analysed whether serum arginase can be used as a indicator of disease severity by comparing it with the Child-Pugh score and MELD score. 

Results: The mean serum arginase value of the study subjects by ELISA method was 92.38 ng/ml with a p value of 0.01 and was found to be statistically significant. When compared with AST & ALT using Child Pugh and Meld score, serum arginase was found to have a poor correlation with severity with a p value of 0.976 with CP score and 0.83 with MELD score which was statistically insignificant. Serum AST values were better predictor of severity with a p value of 0.432 with CP score and 0.018 with MELD score which was statistically significant.

Conclusion: Serum arginase can be used in diagnosis of liver diseases but a poor indicator of the severity when compared with scoring systems. Serum AST correlated better with severity in this study.

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Suresh Babu .S

Assistant Professor, Department of General Medicine, Sri Manakula Vinayagar Medical College and Hospital, Puducherry