Evaluation of hepatic fibrosis by elastography in patients with schistosomiasis mansoni

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:sec> <jats:title>Background</jats:title> <jats:p>Periportal fibrosis is associated with the main complications of schistosomiasis mansoni. The usefulness of hepatic transient elastography (TE) in its evaluation remains to be clarified.</jats:p> </jats:sec> <jats:sec> <jats:title>Methods</jats:title> <jats:p>We conducted a cross-sectional study of schistosomal patients, where the measurements obtained by FibroScan TE were correlated with the degree of liver fibrosis according to the Niamey sonographic protocol, adopted as the gold standard, and its performance was calculated as the area under the receiver operating characteristics curve (AUROC).</jats:p> </jats:sec> <jats:sec> <jats:title>Results</jats:title> <jats:p>A total of 117 of 141 adult schistosomiasis patients from endemic areas were selected between May and August 2015. Applying the Niamey protocol, the patients were regrouped into absent fibrosis (A; 34.2%), mild to moderate fibrosis (MM; 27.4%) and intense fibrosis (I; 38.5%). The median of the TE values in the patients of group A was 4.7 kPa, the group MM 9.3 kPa and the group I 10.3 kPa. There was a difference in the TE values between the group A and the groups MM and I (p &amp;lt; 0.05). The TE also presented strong and direct correlation with the clinical form (r ≥ 0.77). The AUROC value to define the presence of fibrosis was 0.92 and for significant fibrosis was 0.79, with cut-offs of 6.1 kPa and 8.9 kPa, respectively.</jats:p> </jats:sec> <jats:sec> <jats:title>Conclusions</jats:title> <jats:p>In this study, the TE was effective in the diagnosis of schistosomal fibrosis, being able to identify the advanced forms of the disease and thus predict the risk of clinical complications in endemic regions.</jats:p> </jats:sec>

Noninvasive Assessment of Schistosoma‐Related Periportal Fibrosis

“…The study has also been criticized for not establishing direct link between Niamey PPF patterns and TE findings, which may be due to the small sample size and the predominant enrolment of patients with early stages of PPF. A similar correlation assessment between Niamey patterns of HSS and TE findings was performed by Lima et al 46 They found that the median LSM values for patients with moderate to advanced patterns of HSS were 9.3 and 10.3 kPa, respectively, confirming previous findings that PPF tend to present with intermediate LSM values.…”

Noninvasive diagnosis of periportal fibrosis in schistosomiasis mansoni: A comprehensive review

“…Recently, elastography-based imaging techniques, such as TE and point shear wave elastography (pSWE) using acoustic radiation force imaging (ARFI), have received substantial attention with respect to the non-invasive assessment of the mechanical properties of tissue. These techniques have emerged as complementary to US images in the study of liver fibrosis in many hepatic diseases[ 49 , 50 ] including schistosomiasis mansoni[ 19 , 20 , 51 - 54 ].…”