From NAFLD to Chronic Liver Diseases. Assessment of Liver Fibrosis through Non-Invasive Methods before Liver Transplantation: Can We Rely on Them?

Abstract

Chronic liver injury and subsequent liver fibrosis are usually a slow process without any specific or no clinical signs, resulting in pathological conditions with a poor chance of improvement through medical and surgical treatment, which if not promptly recognized, often lead to a liver transplant as the only therapeutic option. On the other hand, screening and follow-up are hard to establish in large populations using regularly invasive methods such as biopsies and other expensive diagnostic tools due to cost and a lack of adequate specificity and sensibility. In the last few years, a large variety of serological and radiological tests have been proposed to assess liver fibrosis. In this review, we will consider the most commonly used scores to evaluate liver fibrosis, with a special focus on the NAFLD pathogenesis. We will try to answer the question: can we rely on them?

Keywords

• liver fibrosis
• NAFLD
• cirrhosis
• non-invasive methods
• liver transplantation