Spleen size for the prediction of clinical outcome in patients with primary sclerosing cholangitis

Dear Sir, We read with interest the work of van der Meer et al1 who propose a risk score for patients with chronic Hepatitis C. The authors demonstrate that the assessment of readily available and objective parameters can stratify patients according to the risk of disease progression. Patients with primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC) usually develop progressive liver fibrosis and end-stage liver disease within 10–20 years.2 Simple and non-invasive means for disease stratification and prediction of prognosis are urgently needed. Indeed, the International PSC Study Group recently declared the research on surrogate end-point markers as a high-priority task,3 since several clinical studies investigating novel treatment strategies will be initiated in near future. Transient elastography has recently been shown to predict disease progression in PSC.4 However, transient elastography is not widely available and harbours technical challenges especially in obese patients. Additionally, liver stiffness may...

Source: Gut - June 2, 2016 Category: Gastroenterology Authors: Ehlken, H., Wroblewski, R., Corpechot, C., Arrive, L., Lezius, S., Hartl, J., Denzer, U. W., Lohse, A. W., Chazouilleres, O., Schramm, C. Tags: PostScript Source Type: research