Serum macrophage inflammatory protein 3{alpha} levels predict the severity of HBV-related acute-on-chronic liver failure

Dear Editor, We read with interest the paper by Angeli et al1 proposing the value of the acute-on-chronic liver failure (ACLF) stratification in the prediction of short-term mortality in patients with acute decompensation of cirrhosis. Other studies2 3 indicated that the dynamic changes in serological markers are associated with patients who have cirrhosis. We hypothesised that the pathological processes of HBV-related ACLF (HBV-ACLF) would result in specific changes in the levels of signalling proteins in the blood. Thus, we aimed to search detectable biomarkers to predict the outcome of HBV-ACLF. We collected serum samples from 420 patients with HBV-ACLF, 121 patients with chronic hepatitis B (CHB) and 25 normal controls to identify novel serological biomarkers of HBV-ACLF (see online supplementary table S1). As an initial screening group, 15 subjects were included in the cytokine antibody array analyses (n=5 per group). The remaining 551...

Source: Gut - January 6, 2016 Category: Gastroenterology Authors: Xin, J., Ding, W., Hao, S., Chen, X., Zhang, J., Jiang, L., Zhou, Q., Shi, D., Zhang, L., Xu, X., Cao, H., Li, L., Li, J. Tags: PostScript Source Type: research