Non-Invasive Biomarkers of Metabolic Liver Disease (NIMBLE)

Non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), a serious condition associated with obesity and diabetes, is estimated to affect between 9 and 15 million people in the United States. NASH causes fat to accumulate in the liver, which leads to inflammation and cell damage. Unfortunately, NASH does not present any symptoms until it has progressed into later stages, when serious complications like cirrhosis leave few treatment options for patients. Because diagnosing early-stage NASH is difficult and expensive, patients with NASH often remain undiagnosed until it is too late and they have developed either cirrhosis, which ultimately requires liver transplant, or liver cancer, which can be fatal. Currently, the only means of diagnosing NASH is by visual imaging analysis of a liver biopsy. However, surgical biopsy—an invasive, expensive, and painful procedure that carries risk of serious complications—only provides information from a small part of the liver and may not present an accurate picture of a patient’s disease. Drug development efforts against NASH have been hampered by the fact that recruitment into a clinical trial and assessment of treatment response require that patients undergo a liver biopsy. To properly treat these patients and to develop effective therapies against NASH, Researchers must produce new, non-invasive and reliable measures of NASH in at-risk patients.

Learn more: https://fnih.org/nimble

Видео Non-Invasive Biomarkers of Metabolic Liver Disease (NIMBLE) канала FNIH