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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Massimo Younes, Dr Olivier GovaereORCiD, Dr Dina Tiniakos, Professor Alastair BurtORCiD, Marco Youssef William Zaki, Dr Luca Miele, Professor Quentin AnsteeORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND).
© 2021 European Association for the Study of the LiverBackground & Aims: Non-invasive scoring systems (NSS) are used to identify patients with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) who are at risk of advanced fibrosis, but their reliability in predicting long-term outcomes for hepatic/extrahepatic complications or death and their concordance in cross-sectional and longitudinal risk stratification remain uncertain. Methods: The most common NSS (NFS, FIB-4, BARD, APRI) and the Hepamet fibrosis score (HFS) were assessed in 1,173 European patients with NAFLD from tertiary centres. Performance for fibrosis risk stratification and for the prediction of long-term hepatic/extrahepatic events, hepatocarcinoma (HCC) and overall mortality were evaluated in terms of AUC and Harrell's c-index. For longitudinal data, NSS-based Cox proportional hazard models were trained on the whole cohort with repeated 5-fold cross-validation, sampling for testing from the 607 patients with all NSS available. Results: Cross-sectional analysis revealed HFS as the best performer for the identification of significant (F0-1 vs. F2-4, AUC = 0.758) and advanced (F0-2 vs. F3-4, AUC = 0.805) fibrosis, while NFS and FIB-4 showed the best performance for detecting histological cirrhosis (range AUCs 0.85-0.88). Considering longitudinal data (follow-up between 62 and 110 months), NFS and FIB-4 were the best at predicting liver-related events (c-indices>0.7), NFS for HCC (c-index = 0.9 on average), and FIB-4 and HFS for overall mortality (c-indices >0.8). All NSS showed limited performance (c-indices <0.7) for extrahepatic events. Conclusions: Overall, NFS, HFS and FIB-4 outperformed APRI and BARD for both cross-sectional identification of fibrosis and prediction of long-term outcomes, confirming that they are useful tools for the clinical management of patients with NAFLD at increased risk of fibrosis and liver-related complications or death. Lay summary: Non-invasive scoring systems are increasingly being used in patients with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease to identify those at risk of advanced fibrosis and hence clinical complications. Herein, we compared various non-invasive scoring systems and identified those that were best at identifying risk, as well as those that were best for the prediction of long-term outcomes, such as liver-related events, liver cancer and death.
Author(s): Younes R, Caviglia GP, Govaere O, Rosso C, Armandi A, Sanavia T, Pennisi G, Liguori A, Francione P, Gallego-Duran R, Ampuero J, Garcia Blanco MJ, Aller R, Tiniakos D, Burt A, David E, Vecchio FM, Maggioni M, Cabibi D, Pareja MJ, Zaki MYW, Grieco A, Fracanzani AL, Valenti L, Miele L, Fariselli P, Petta S, Romero-Gomez M, Anstee QM, Bugianesi E
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Journal of Hepatology
Year: 2021
Volume: 75
Issue: 4
Pages: 786-794
Print publication date: 01/10/2021
Online publication date: 04/06/2021
Acceptance date: 07/05/2021
Date deposited: 10/05/2021
ISSN (print): 0168-8278
ISSN (electronic): 1600-0641
Publisher: Elsevier B.V.
URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhep.2021.05.008
DOI: 10.1016/j.jhep.2021.05.008
PubMed id: 34090928
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