Frequency of Positive Fecal Occult Blood Test in Patients with Cirrhosis

OBJECTIVES The objective of this study is to determine the frequency of positive fecal occult blood tests in patients with cirrhosis. METHODOLOGY This descriptive cross-sectional study had a total of 154 patients observed for six months i.e., from 12/3/2023 to 12/9/2023 in the Department of Medicine, Khyber Teaching Hospital, Peshawar. Patients (aged 18-70 years) were worked up with detailed history and clinical examination to reveal ascites, coagulopathy, jaundice, splenomegaly, cachexia, and gynecomastia. After having excluded the confounders, a morning fecal sample was taken under aseptic conditions in a specialized fecal occult blood testing kit and sent for laboratory evaluation for interpretation. The sampling technique was consecutive non-probability. All investigations were done from the same laboratory and under the supervision of a hematologist with three years of fellowship experience. Data was stored and analyzed by the statistical program IBM-SPSS version 22. Frequencies and percentages were calculated for qualitative variables like gender, child-pugh class for cirrhosis, and positive fecal occult blood test. Post-stratification was done through a chi-square test and p-values <0.05 were considered as significant. RESULTSIn this study, the mean age was 57 years with SD ± 11.27. Sixty-two percent of patients were males while 38% of patients were females. The mean duration of the disease was 1 year with SD ± 3.57. More than 37% of patients had a positive fecal occult blood test while 63% of patients had a negative fecal occult blood test. CONCLUSION Our study shows that the frequency of positive fecal occult blood tests was 37% in patients with cirrhosis.