Independent validation of the Enhanced Liver Fibrosis (ELF) score in the ANRS HC EP 23 Fibrostar cohort of patients with chronic hepatitis C

Abstract

This study confirms the ELF score performance as an index to predict liver fibrosis or cirrhosis in CHC. The ELF test, using validated reagents, could be added to the health authorities approved non-invasive tests in assessing fibrosis as surrogate to liver biopsy.

Serum biomarkers for the non-invasive diagnosis of liver fibrosis: the importance of being validated

“…In this issue of Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine, Guechot and colleagues proposed an independent validation of ELF score in a large cohort of patients with chronic hepatitis C. The authors report an area under the curve of 0.78 for signifi cant fi brosis and of 0.85 for cirrhosis that is somehow in line with previous studies (11) . Moreover, they showed that the ELF score performed better than HA and slightly worse as compared to Fibrotest and Hepascore.…”

How useful are ARFI elastography cut-off values proposed by meta-analysis for predicting the significant fibrosis and compensated liver cirrhosis?

“…Liver fibrosis assessment can be performed using invasive (liver biopsy-LB) or non-invasive methods, which include elastography [1,2] or serological tests [3,4].…”

Non-invasive Diagnostics of Liver Fibrosis

“…Since 1997, a group of European scientists led by Rosenberg, and funded by Bayer Health care, have been seeking serum markers of liver fi brosis [6,8,28,29,30]. The program lasts for more than a decade and comes to identifying the ELF panel and is currently marketed in Europe.…”

“…ELISA method was used for performing the ELF test. The results show that the ELF test is an algorithm of three biomarkers that can be used to determine the stage of hepatic fi brosis with good precision [29,30,31]. The calculation is based on age, HA, PIIINP and TIMP.…”