TY - JOUR T1 - Liver posters 410–441 JF - Gut JO - Gut SP - a111 LP - A119 DO - 10.1136/gut.50.suppl_2.a111 VL - 50 IS - suppl 2 A2 - , Y1 - 2002/04/01 UR - http://gut.bmj.com/content/50/suppl_2/a111.abstract N2 - K. Dabos, P. Ramachandran, I. Sadler1, J. Plevris, P. Hayes. Liver Cell Biology Laboratory, Department of Medicine, Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK; 1The Department of Chemistry, University of Edinburgh, King's Buildings, Edinburgh, UKBoth taurine and hippurate are mainly produced by the liver and their excretion rate in the urine could provide us with markers in liver dysfunction. We aimed to evaluate the usefulness of urinary taurine and hippurate levels as markers of cirrhosis.Materials and Methods: Urine was collected from 40 patients with alcoholic cirrhosis (18 males and 12 females) aged 37 -74 (mean age 52.9) and 20 controls (25 males and 15 females) aged 21–68 years old (mean age 49.9) with normal liver function. All patients had moderate to severe liver disease (mean Child's Pugh score 9.3) due to ethanol abuse. We used 1H NMR spectroscopy to quantify levels of taurine and hippurate in the patients urine. Both taurine and hippurate were expressed as excretion indexes relative to the amount of creatinine in each sample. ANOVA was applied to compare values between the groups.Results: Taurine excretion index was significantly higher in cirrhotics than controls (0.27 ± 0.04 vs 0.046 ± 0.005) (p<0.009). Hippurate excretion index was significantly lower in patients with cirrhosis than controls ( 0.097 ± 0.016 vs 0.25 ± 0.06) (p<0.014). If the two values were combined then the results were again highly statistically significant (p<0.000126).Conclusions: A combination of low hippurate and high taurine excretions is highly significant in alcoholic cirrhosis and can be a cheap non invasive marker of the disease.E.J. Williams, E. McFarlane, E. Rigney, B. Saward, M.P. Bradley, D. Ray-Chaudhuri, C. Davidson, D. Gleeson. Liver Unit, Sheffield Teaching Hospitals, Sheffield, UKIntroduction: Brief counselling for hazardous drinkers can lead to reduced alcohol consumption, hence detection is … ER -