Frankfurt ⋅ No other chronic disease that leads to hospital admissions has such a high mortality rate in Germany as liver cirrhosis. This is the result of a study by Frankfurt University Medicine. The scientists evaluated data sets from the Federal Statistical Office for around 250 million hospital admissions in the years 2005 to 2018. In 0.94 percent of the cases, cirrhosis of the liver – usually as an accompanying disease – was diagnosed upon admission.
The mortality rate for this condition fell from 11.6 to 9.5 percent during the observation period. However, it was still higher than that of heart failure (8.4 percent), kidney failure (6.4 percent) and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (5.2 percent). When cirrhosis coexisted with another disease, the mortality rate increased two to threefold, most notably in infectious respiratory diseases. The main cause of liver cirrhosis is alcohol abuse. zo.