Arun Sanyal, MD: The Importance of Continuous Data for NAFLD

The need for ongoing, continuous data is important for studying virtually any disease, including non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), neither of which have treatments approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

That is why a study like TARGET-NASH is important because it allows investigators to collect data on a longer period of time and monitor different attributes and data points from patients with NASH or NAFLD.

In an interview with HCPLive®, Arun J. Sanyal, MBBS, MD, Director of Stravitz-Sanyal Institute for Liver Disease and Metabolic Health, Interim Chair of Division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition, Z. Reno Vlahcevic Professor of Medicine, Physiology, and Molecular Pathology, Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine, discussed how important it will be to continue to study and examine patients with these liver disorders and discover how patients ultimately change over time in an effort to improve treatments, screenings, and care.

“You have to remember, to do these types of things you have to have a lot of data and in usual clinical practice people might come in once a year,” Sanyal said. “There’s a paucity of data and here we have patients across a spectrum of clinical centers and data will be collected as part of real-world evidence.”

Recently, investigators presented new results as part of TARGET-NASH showing longitudinal trajectories of alanine aminotransferase (ALT), a common liver biomarker, were stable among patient with NAFLD.

The data was presented at the International Liver Congress (ILC) 2022 in London and is part of TARGET-NASH, an observational study of participants with NAFLD and/or NASH in usual clinical practice.