Prehepatic portal hypertension: experience with 88 cases.

Although prehepatic portal hypertension (PHPH) is less common than intrahepatic portal hypertension, it gives rise to more serious diagnostic and therapeutic problems than the latter. From their experience of 88 cases, the authors feel that it is necessary for a correct approach to PHPH to derive a classification useful throughout the clinical course of these patients. They distinguish PHPH due to extrinsic obstruction from PHPH due to intrinsic obstruction, and subdivide these two classes according to etiologic, pathologic and hemodynamic criteria. A series of principles has been developed, in answer to the problems related to each of these classes, as an aid in the prevention of portal hypertension relapse.