CHB-LFC MethodologyCHB-LFC AlgorithmCHB-LFC InstructionsLEMPSCHB-LFCLEMPSScoresAbout
Background
Chronic hepatitis B (CHB) is a major public health problem worldwide with more than 2 billion people with the evidence of exposure and more than 240 million people with the evidence of chronic infection. Accurate assessment of the extent of liver fibrosis remains one of the most important factors determining the need for active treatment.
More than 20 different clinical scores or imaging modalities have been devised as a non-invasive alternative to the LB, with variable diagnostic accuracies. In a resource limited settings of less developed countries, the use of noninvasive markers associated with increased costs such as Fibroscan and Fibrotest is not widely available. Therefore, it is not unusual for clinicians in these countries to use free alternatives in order to reduce costs but without clear evidence based strategy of which test to choose and for what purpose (i.e presence or exclusion of significant fibrosis or cirrhosis). The fact that noninvasive tests are less investigated in CHB population adds to the problem.
Therefore, we aimed to evaluate diagnostic accuracy of five free noninvasive markers for CHB related fibrosis against LB and to create an optimized algorithm that would result in the best ratio between classified patients (i.e. classified as either having or not significant liver fibrosis) and accuracy of classification.
For more details please refer to original publication describing the algorithm.
Salkic NN et al. Eur J Intern Med. 2012 doi: 10.1016/j.ejim.2015.07.005. Epub 2015 Jul 17.
