Alcoholic Hepatitis
Definition: Alcoholic Hepatitis
According to McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms, alcoholic hepatitis is "a frequently occurring form of hepatitis that is caused by excessive ethyl alcohol intake and is characterized by fever, high white blood cell count, and jaundice". Alcoholic hepatitis can cause both acute (meaning that the disease occur sudden or severe and the symptoms have a fast evolution) and chronic (which means that the disease is persisting over an extended period of time) forms of the disease.
Being caused by the usage of alcohol, the chances to develop that kind of hepatitis is increased by the duration of alcohol abuse, the quantity ingested in that period and by genetic factors - usually, alcoholic hepatitis occurs in decades after the onset of excessive drinking, but there are some rare cases in which it starts in the first year of the alcohol abuse.