Non-traumatic diagnosis of liver fibrosis in chronic liver disease

Liver fibrosis refers to the persistent and repeated necrosis or inflammatory stimulation of hepatocytes in various chronic liver diseases, which leads to the body’s repair response, massive fiber proliferation accompanied by relative or absolute deficiency of fiber degradation, and massive deposition of extracellular matrix in the liver. Liver fibrosis is a common pathological process in many chronic liver diseases, and a large number of clinical studies have shown that because of the existence of fiber degradation mechanisms in the body, liver fibrosis can be reduced or reversed, and even early cirrhosis may be reversed, but the development of cirrhosis to the middle and late stages is no longer reversible. If liver fibrosis can be blocked, reduced or even reversed, the prognosis of patients with chronic liver disease can be improved to a large extent. Therefore, early diagnosis of liver fibrosis is of great clinical significance in determining the disease progression, clinical outcome, selection of anti-hepatic fibrosis therapeutic drugs and their efficacy assessment of chronic liver disease. For a long time, the diagnosis of liver fibrosis relies on liver biopsy pathology, and this traumatic examination has many obvious shortcomings. For example, it is invasive, difficult to biopsy repeatedly, has some complications (1/3 of patients have pain; 0.3% of patients have serious complications including bleeding, pneumothorax, colon and gallbladder perforation; and 0.03% mortality rate [1]), the lesion is not homogeneous within the liver, there are observer’s own and inter-observer variations (semi-quantitative staging system can be inaccurate by 1-2 stages), the specimen is not of sufficient length ( length 2) were predicted to have a SN of 100% for APRI >0.4 and NPV at reaching 100% for APRI ≤0.4. APRI≤0.5 indicated no liver fibrosis, >1.5 indicated liver fibrosis; <1 indicated no cirrhosis, >2 indicated cirrhosis. Its value is superior to AST/ALT ratio, age/platelet index, Forns Index and Bonacini’s discriminant score [9].Leonardo et al. studied 203 patients with chronic hepatitis C, whose APRI was found to have an AUC of 0.81.