Joint project with

Reserach on Liver Elastography at the Clínic

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The Viral, Genetic and Immune-Mediated Liver Diseases group at the Clínic Barcelona uses liver elastography to manage patients with autoimmune hepatitis and cholestatic liver diseases (where bile flow is slowed or stopped) both in daily clinical practice and to research its role as a predictor of long-term disease evolution in patients.

The group research projects are in the following fields:

Role of liver elastography as a non-invasive predictor of outcomes in autoimmune hepatitis (AIH)

Liver elastography has recently emerged as a valuable tool to monitor the progression of various liver diseases, including AIH. However, for AIH, its performance is often affected by the presence of inflammation. For this reason, a retrospective analysis of AIH patients from different centres in Spain was performed to investigate the ability of liver elastography as a predictor of adverse outcomes in AIH patients.

The results highlighted that consecutive elastography liver stiffness measurements, starting from 6 months of immunosuppressive treatment, can effectively predict the long-term disease progression of AIH patients.

Long-term CAP (controlled attenuation parameter) evaluation for monitoring liver fat in autoimmune hepatitis (AIH)

The controlled attenuation parameter (CAP) has been shown to be useful for detecting fat accumulation in the liver in people with AIH. However, its role in the long-term monitoring of these patients was unclear. Therefore, a retrospective analysis was performed of patients with AIH for whom CAP values were available. The aim was to evaluate the usefulness of CAP in detecting fatty liver and to analyse the effects of corticosteroids and metabolic comorbidity on its progression.

The results demonstrated that CAP is a valuable tool for detecting fatty liver in AIH and that the dose and duration of corticosteroid treatment do not contribute to its development in these patients. In fact, a high body mass index and CAP were the most significant predictors of the development of fatty liver in patients with AIH during follow-up.