Hemostasis testing in patients with liver dysfunction: Advantages and caveats

Due to concomitant changes in pro- and anti-coagulant mechanisms, patients with liver dysfunction have a "rebalanced hemostasis", which can easily be tipped toward either a hypo- or a hypercoagulable phenotype. Clinicians are often faced with the question whether patients with chronic liver disease undergoing invasive procedures or surgery and those having active bleeding require correction of the hemostasis abnormalities. Conventional...