Retrospective Cohort Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2022. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Clin Cases. Jun 16, 2022; 10(17): 5566-5576
Published online Jun 16, 2022. doi: 10.12998/wjcc.v10.i17.5566
Longitudinal assessment of liver stiffness by transient elastography for chronic hepatitis C patients
Anya Mezina, Arunkumar Krishnan, Tinsay A Woreta, Kevin B Rubenstein, Eric Watson, Po-Hung Chen, Carla Rodriguez-Watson
Anya Mezina, Department of Medicine, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD 21287, United States
Arunkumar Krishnan, Tinsay A Woreta, Po-Hung Chen, Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD 21231, United States
Kevin B Rubenstein, Eric Watson, Carla Rodriguez-Watson, Mid-Atlantic Permanente Research Institute, Kaiser Permanente Mid-Atlantic States, Rockville 20852, United States
Carla Rodriguez-Watson, Department of Health Policy and Management, Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21287, United States
Carla Rodriguez-Watson, Innovation in Medical Evidence Development and Surveillance (IMEDS) Program, Reagan-Udall Foundation for the FDA, Washington, 20036, United States
Author contributions: Tinsay A Woreta and Po-Hung Chen conceptualized the study; Anya Mezina, Tinsay A Woreta and Po-Hung Chen investigated the study; Anya Mezina, Tinsay A Woreta, Kevin B Rubenstein Po-Hung Chen and Carla Rodriguez-Watson did the methodology; Anya Mezina did the writing - original draft; Arunkumar Krishnan, Tinsay A Woreta, Kevin B Rubenstein Po-Hung Chen and Carla Rodriguez-Watson did the writing-review and editing; Kevin B Rubenstein did the software and visualization; Tinsay A Woreta and Eric Watson did the data curation; Arunkumar Krishnan did the validation.
Supported by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, No. 5KL2TR001077-05 (to Po-Hung Chen).
Institutional review board statement: The study was reviewed and approved for publication by the Institutional Review Board of Johns Hopkins Medicine and Kaiser Permanente Mid-Atlantic States.
Informed consent statement: The need for informed consent was waived due to the retrospective nature of the study.
Conflict-of-interest statement: All the Authors have no conflict of interest related to the manuscript.
Data sharing statement: No additional data are available.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: https://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Carla Rodriguez-Watson, PhD, Senior Researcher, Mid-Atlantic Permanente Research Institute, Kaiser Permanente Mid-Atlantic States, 2101 E Jefferson Street, Rockville 20852, United States. crodriguezwatson@reaganudall.org
Received: August 10, 2021
Peer-review started: August 10, 2021
First decision: November 17, 2021
Revised: December 16, 2021
Accepted: April 21, 2022
Article in press: April 21, 2022
Published online: June 16, 2022
Core Tip

Core Tip: We evaluated changes in liver stiffness measured by transient elastography (TE) in a large, racially diverse cohort of United States patients with chronic hepatitis C (CHC). We retrospectively evaluated differences in liver stiffness between patients treated with direct-acting antiviral (DAA) therapy and untreated patients. Our study shows a higher baseline kPa score was independently associated with decreased liver stiffness, and that differences in liver stiffness may be observed on serial TE measurements in patients with higher baseline scores, irrespective of treatment effect. DAA treatment was not associated with a differential change in liver stiffness over time in patients with CHC compared to untreated patients.