Our liver can inflame due to various reasons including medications and its side effects, excessive alcohol consumption, toxic chemicals, any disorder of the pancreas or gall bladder and other such infections. Inflammation of our liver can be caused due to varied infective agents or hepatitis. However, this term is generic and is used for referring to certain virus groups that have been identified imaginatively with the use of alphabets.

An individual is likely to develop hepatitis if he/she comes into contact with any one of these viruses that causes liver inflammation. The infection might also occur if an individual is over-exposed to certain substances that cause hepatitis, such as fungal toxins, alcohol and certain medications. Medications can lead to hepatitis in two ways—

4     It might either occur as an outcome of poisoning caused due to medication through overdose

4     It might occur as an abnormal liver reaction to a usual dose of medicine. Luckily, the latter doesn’t happen often.

Approximately 20% cases of reported hepatitis are basically autoimmune hepatitis cases. Similar to other such autoimmune disorders, this particular condition also develops because of genetically defective immune system that attacks the own healthy cells and other organs of the body, and in this case, it strikes the liver, after it is triggered by some environmental agent or a virus. The viruses might include hepatitis virus, measles virus or even Epstein-Barr virus that leads to the development of mononucleosis. It is likely that a drug reaction or some toxic affect on the liver can as well trigger autoimmune response in some susceptible individuals. In approximately 30% of the cases, autoimmune hepatitis has been associated with disorders involving autoimmune attacks on various body parts.

Alcohol is yet another primary cause of hepatitis in majority of the sufferers. Approximately 10 to 20 percent of drinkers tend to develop hepatitis due to alcohol. In our body, this alcohol breaks down to form various chemicals which are usually toxic for the liver. When a person drinks for years and years altogether, the liver gets damaged, thus causing cirrhosis in almost 10 to 20 percent of the cases.

Drugs also have an impact on the liver. Since the liver has a great role to play while the drugs metabolize, there are many medications causing similar effects like that of viral hepatitis. The symptoms can manifest anytime from the second week to next six moths after the treatment has been started. In majority of the cases, the symptoms might disappear as the drug is stopped; but in some rare cases, these might progress even further and lead to serious liver disease. Isoniazid, halothane, phenytoin, methyldopa, valproic acid and some of the sulfonamides are the most potential drugs that cause liver damage.

Nonalcoholic steatohepatitis or NASH also has similar features like alcohol-induced hepatitis, and more so in case of fatty liver. But it mostly strikes individuals who are not heavy drinkers. This disorder is likely to occur in combination with other problems like diabetes, obesity, high cholesterol etc. NASHs are regarded as one of the probable causes of chronic hepatitis and are potentially detrimental.