Invasive and non-invasive diagnosis of cirrhosis and portal hypertension

Abstract

With advances in the management and treatment of advanced liver disease, including the use of antiviral therapy, a simple, one stage description for advanced fibrotic liver disease has become inadequate. Although refining the diagnosis of cirrhosis to reflect disease heterogeneity is essential, current diagnostic tests have not kept pace with the progression of this new paradigm. Liver biopsy and hepatic venous pressure gradient measurement are the gold standards for the estimation of hepatic fibrosis and portal hypertension (PHT), respectively, and they have diagnostic and prognostic value. However, they are invasive and, as such, cannot be used repeatedly in clinical practice. The ideal noninvasive test should be safe, easy to perform, inexpensive, reproducible as well as to give numerical and accurate results in real time. It should be predictive of long term outcomes related with fibrosis and PHT to allow prognostic stratification. Recently, many types of noninvasive alternative tests have been developed and are under investigation. In particular, imaging and ultrasound based tests, such as transient elastography, have shown promising results. Although most of these noninvasive tests effectively identify severe fibrosis and PHT, the methods available for diagnosing moderate disease status are still insufficient, and further investigation is essential to predict outcomes and individualize therapy in this field.

Keywords: Hepatic fibrosis; Portal hypertension; Liver biopsy; Hepatic venous pressure gradient; Non-invasive test; Transient elastography

Core tip: Chronic liver disease is a heterogeneous and dynamic condition. So, noninvasive exact estimations of the status and changes in hepatic fibrosis and portal hypertension are essential in the management of this disease. Recently, a few tests, such as liver stiffness measurement based on transient elastography (TE) or magnetic resonance have shown promising results in this field. However, the reproducibility of these non-invasive tests needs to be validated in diverse clinical situations and etiologies. Especially, it is important to study about the long term prognostic value of non-invasive tests in hepatic fibrosis and portal hypertension that can leads to new paradigm in the tailored management of chronic liver disease. Notably, the integration of serologic tests with other non-invasive tests, such as TE, allows the progression in the management of patients with chronic liver disease in the future.