RESUMO
A 41-year-old man was admitted to the Emergency Department with bilateral numbness in lower extremities and left femoral palsy. He also reported constitutional symptoms, vomiting and non-bloody diarrhoea for the last several months. He had a previous history of eosinophilic asthma with erratic follow-up. During admission, eosinophil count was 66% of white blood cells. Sural nerve biopsy revealed vasculitis with eosinophilic infiltration. Further evaluations consisted of colonoscopy and nasal endoscopy that confirmed eosinophil infiltrates on colonic ulcers and nasal polypi. The patient was started on systemic corticosteroids and cyclophosphamide. Among his personal records, he had been taking nandrolone decanoate without medical prescription, and had withdrawn a few years before the first asthma exacerbation.
RESUMO
BACKGROUND & AIMS: Non-invasive scoring systems (NSS) are used to identify patients with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) who are at risk of advanced fibrosis, but their reliability in predicting long-term outcomes for hepatic/extrahepatic complications or death and their concordance in cross-sectional and longitudinal risk stratification remain uncertain. METHODS: The most common NSS (NFS, FIB-4, BARD, APRI) and the Hepamet fibrosis score (HFS) were assessed in 1,173 European patients with NAFLD from tertiary centres. Performance for fibrosis risk stratification and for the prediction of long-term hepatic/extrahepatic events, hepatocarcinoma (HCC) and overall mortality were evaluated in terms of AUC and Harrell's c-index. For longitudinal data, NSS-based Cox proportional hazard models were trained on the whole cohort with repeated 5-fold cross-validation, sampling for testing from the 607 patients with all NSS available. RESULTS: Cross-sectional analysis revealed HFS as the best performer for the identification of significant (F0-1 vs. F2-4, AUC = 0.758) and advanced (F0-2 vs. F3-4, AUC = 0.805) fibrosis, while NFS and FIB-4 showed the best performance for detecting histological cirrhosis (range AUCs 0.85-0.88). Considering longitudinal data (follow-up between 62 and 110 months), NFS and FIB-4 were the best at predicting liver-related events (c-indices>0.7), NFS for HCC (c-index = 0.9 on average), and FIB-4 and HFS for overall mortality (c-indices >0.8). All NSS showed limited performance (c-indices <0.7) for extrahepatic events. CONCLUSIONS: Overall, NFS, HFS and FIB-4 outperformed APRI and BARD for both cross-sectional identification of fibrosis and prediction of long-term outcomes, confirming that they are useful tools for the clinical management of patients with NAFLD at increased risk of fibrosis and liver-related complications or death. LAY SUMMARY: Non-invasive scoring systems are increasingly being used in patients with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease to identify those at risk of advanced fibrosis and hence clinical complications. Herein, we compared various non-invasive scoring systems and identified those that were best at identifying risk, as well as those that were best for the prediction of long-term outcomes, such as liver-related events, liver cancer and death.