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Variceal hemorrhage is a serious complication of cirrhosis — and the most lethal type of upper gastrointestinal bleeding. To determine trends in the rate of hospitalization for this condition, and also in the incidence of nonbleeding esophageal varices in both inpatient and outpatient settings, investigators mined two large U.S. databases: the Nationwide Inpatient Sample, which included information collected from 1988 to 2002 on hospital admissions for both bleeding and nonbleeding esophageal varices, and the State Ambulatory Surgery Databases, which included information collected from 1997 to 2003 on outpatient postprocedure diagnoses of nonbleeding esophageal varices.
Between the 1988–1990 and the 1994–1996 periods, the rate of hospitaliza…