Diseases, Disorders information

Wilson’s disease is a disease which is marked by defective copper metabolism. You wind up with far too much copper in your liver, your central nervous system, and also in the kidney. The liver and the central nervous system are the two that really present to you most often, in terms of clinical symptoms. Now on the lab tests, what are you going to see? The serum copper is low and the serum ceruloplasmin, which is the carrier protein, is low. You are going to do a 24 hour urine copper. That’s going to be really high. And you are going to have your local, friendly hepatologist do a liver biopsy and you will note that the liver copper content is quite elevated, and that’s the diagnostic test. So if you are worried about Wilson’s disease, get someone to do a liver biopsy on that child.
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The presentation can be all over the map. It can present as acute fulminant hepatitis. If it does, the tip-off is that these children have acute hemolytic anemia in association with their fulminant liver failure. If you see that combination, think Wilson’s disease until proven otherwise. They may present as a chronic active hepatitis, cirrhosis, portal hypertension, variceal bleeding. They may be totally asymptomatic with just a moderately elevated transaminitis. Some of these children do present with the neurologic symptoms more than the liver symptoms and they can be very subtle. Changes in personality, school performance, behavior characteristics that the parents come in and say, “This just isn’t anything like the child I used to know.” Be very aware of that. The Kayser-Fleischer rings, the brown pigment around the iris, is always talked about in the books. Very difficult to see and you usually are not going to see it until the mid-teenage years.
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The treatment for Wilson’s disease depends on when your diagnose is, which is why early diagnosis is essential. If there is no cirrhosis you are going to treat these patients with chelating agents, like penicillamine. However, if fully developed cirrhosis has already occurred, or they are presenting to you in fulminant liver failure, you have no other option but liver transplantation. There is another reason why diagnosis is so very important, because once you identify the index case you’ve got to screen those family members because you may be sitting on an asymptomatic sibling who you can treat very successfully with chelating agents, even if the index case is quite sick when you see them the first time.