Common Affections of the Liver Author:William Hale-White Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: DISEASES OF THE VESSELS OF THE LIVER Diseases Of The Portal Vein By far the most important of these is thrombosis, and as the clotting is always associate... more »d with some disease of the wall of the vein, the condition is sometimes spoken of as portal thrombosis, sometimes as pylephlebitis. There are two varieties, suppurative and non-suppurative. Non-suppurative Pylephlebitis.—The most common cause for this is cirrhosis of the liver, which accounts for between a third and a half of the cases; nevertheless it is a very rare complication of cirrhosis of the liver, being present in only 3 per cent. of those in whom cirrhosis of the liver is found after death. Long-lasting increase of the blood pressure in the portal vein is likely to lead to chronic inflammation of its wall, just as the pulmonary artery becomes thick and atheromatous in cases of mitral constriction; and it is very likely that this predisposes to clotting in the portal vein in cirrhosis. Further, the stagnation of the flow through the portal vein will contribute; but micro-organismsplay a very important part in the formation of thrombi, and they are no doubt the determining cause of the thrombosis to which the thickening of the wall of the vein and the slow circulation through it predispose. The resisting power of patients with cirrhosis is low, so that micro-organisms easily get a foothold. Malignant disease within the abdomen is the next most common cause for portal thrombosis; but although abdominal malignant disease is the cause of 10 per cent. of the cases of portal thrombosis, yet this is a very exceptional complication of malignant disease. Thus malignant disease of the stomach, liver, intestine, or pancreas may ulcerate its way into the lumen of some branch of the portal vein; this leads to some inflam...« less