Acute Liver Failure as the First Manifestation of Very Late Relapsing of Hodgkin’s Disease

Hodgkin’s disease is, in general, a lymph node-based disease. It usually starts in an area within the lymphatic system and spreads, in an orderly manner, along the lymph­atic chain to contiguous lymph node areas. There have been sporadic case reports of acute liver failure caused by hematological malignancies. Generally, liver failure is a feature of stage IV end-stage disease, when it occurs in lymphoma. Thus, hepatic involvement usually occurs late in the course of Hodgkin’s disease or with advanced-stage disease, and primary presentation in the liver with acute liver failure is extremely rare. In most cases, the diagnosis was made at aut­opsy. We describe a patient with Hodgkin’s disease presenting with acute liver failure. This is a very unusual Hodgkin’s disease form of presentation, because the acute liver failure was the presenting feature of the disease. Furthermore, the lymphoma occurred as a very late relapse, twenty years after the first diagnosis. To the best of our knowledge, such a case has not been described to date.