Can Non-Invasive Tests Assess Fibrosis in Hepatitis?

Percutaneous liver biopsy is a proven way to rate the fibrosis stage both in hepatitis in chronic hepatitis C patients and hepatitis B patients. But it is uncomfortable for patients, risks complications and is prone to assembling errors.

Reporting at ID Week 2015 in San Diego, CA, Tuma Demirdal, DR, and colleagues at the Katip Celebi University in Izmir, Turkey compared these invasive tests with non-invasive methods.

They looked at 236 patients with chronic hepatitits C and hepatitis B who had ultrasound guided liver biopsy over a seven year period

Histological grading of necroinflammation and fibrosis ere performed according to Knodell an ISAK scoring systems. APRI, n-APRI, FIB-4, FI scores wer calculated.

The patients wer evalued in two groups .

The result sof the non invasive tsts were compared for each fibrosis stage of biopsy result.

Sensitivity, specificity and prositive predictive values, as well as negative predictive value were calculated for each fibrosis stage, and in both hep-B and hep-C patients.

For all the non invasive test, the negative predictive values were statistically significant, but the positive predictive values were highly variable and did not always correlate with the biopsy results.

Fibro index showed better performance with higher sensitivity and specificity rates compared to the other non-invasive tests.