A research team from the Department of Medicine III at MedUni Vienna and University Hospital Vienna has conducted a study that proves the value of checking the health of the liver more than once using a new method.
This method significantly improves the risk assessment for patients suffering from chronic liver disease.
The results of the research were recently published in the Gastroenterology journal.
This new method is centered around measuring how stiff the liver is. This measurement is becoming a common practice to determine how severe a person’s chronic liver disease is and to guide doctors on the best treatment plan.
However, it was unclear how to understand the changes in liver stiffness over time.
To find an answer, the researchers led by Georg Semmler, David Bauer, and Thomas Reiberger from the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology at MedUni Vienna and University Hospital Vienna, examined liver stiffness measurements in many patients with chronic liver disease.
Understanding the Disease’s Progression
Over a period of roughly six years, they carried out a total of 8,561 liver stiffness measurements on 2,508 patients.
The team kept a close eye on how the disease was progressing and how changes in liver stiffness predicted the occurrence of serious liver-related complications or the death of patients during the study.
Serious liver-related complications can include the buildup of fluid in the abdomen, bleeding from veins in the esophagus or stomach, or confusion due to the liver’s decreased ability to remove toxins from the body.
These conditions can significantly worsen a patient’s outlook and can be life-threatening in many cases.
Personalizing Treatment Plans
The researchers found that tracking how liver stiffness changed over time was a better way of predicting the risk of these severe complications than just one measurement.
The changes in liver stiffness were more helpful than other methods that are often used to determine how severe liver disease is, such as the FIB-4 score or the MELD score.
The team was also able to explain how changes in liver stiffness should be understood.
They figured out how much the outlook for a patient with chronic liver disease improves or worsens when liver stiffness decreases or increases by a certain percentage.
Thomas Reiberger, the lead researcher in the study, highlighted the importance of these findings. He explained that understanding a patient’s personal risk profile can help start the best, personalized treatment.
This is crucial as the number of people with chronic liver disease, especially fatty liver disease, is increasing globally. This rise is strongly connected to risk factors like being overweight, obese, or consuming too much alcohol.
If you care about liver health, please read studies about a diet that can treat fatty liver disease and obesity, and coffee drinkers may halve their risk of liver cancer.
For more information about health, please see recent studies that an anti-inflammatory diet could help prevent fatty liver disease, and results showing vitamin D could help prevent non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
The study was published in Gastroenterology.
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