Alcoholic liver disease: A registry view on comorbidities and disease prediction

by Dhouha Grissa, Ditlev Nytoft Rasmussen, Aleksander Krag, S øren Brunak, Lars Juhl Jensen Alcoholic-related liver disease (ALD) is the cause of more than half of all liver-related deaths. Sustained excess drinking causes fatty liver and alcohol-related steatohepatitis, which may progress to alcoholic liver fibrosis (ALF) and eventually to alcohol-related liver cirrhosis (ALC). Unfortun ately, it is difficult to identify patients with early-stage ALD, as these are largely asymptomatic. Consequently, the majority of ALD patients are only diagnosed by the time ALD has reached decompensated cirrhosis, a symptomatic phase marked by the development of complications as bleeding and ascit es. The main goal of this study is to discover relevant upstream diagnoses helping to understand the development of ALD, and to highlight meaningful downstream diagnoses that represent its progression to liver failure. Here, we use data from the Danish health registries covering the entire populatio n of Denmark during nineteen years (1996–2014), to examine if it is possible to identify patients likely to develop ALF or ALC based on their past medical history. To this end, we explore a knowledge discovery approach by using high-dimensional statistical and machine learning techniques to extrac t and analyze data from the Danish National Patient Registry. Consistent with the late diagnoses of ALD, we find that ALC is the most common form of ALD in the registry data and that ALC patients have a s...
Source: PLoS Computational Biology - Category: Biology Authors: Source Type: research