Case Control Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2023. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Hepatol. Jul 27, 2023; 15(7): 904-913
Published online Jul 27, 2023. doi: 10.4254/wjh.v15.i7.904
Liver stiffness in pregnant women with intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy: A case control study
Juliane Nees, Franziska J Ammon, Johannes Mueller, Herbert Fluhr, Sebastian Mueller
Juliane Nees, Franziska J Ammon, Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics, University Hospital Heidelberg, Heidelberg 69120, Germany
Johannes Mueller, Sebastian Mueller, Center for Alcohol Research, University Hospital Heidelberg, Heidelberg 69120, Germany
Herbert Fluhr, Division of Obstetrics, Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Medical University of Graz, Graz 8036, Austria
Author contributions: Nees J, Fluhr H, and Mueller S designed and coordinated the study; Nees J and Ammon FJ performed the experiments; Nees J, Mueller S, and Mueller J analyzed and interpreted the data; Nees J and Mueller S wrote the manuscript.
Supported by The Faculty of Medicine Heidelberg in The Form of The Rahel-Goitein-Strauss Fellowship to JN.
Institutional review board statement: The study was approved by the ethics committee of University of Heidelberg.
Informed consent statement: All patients gave informed consent.
Conflict-of-interest statement: All the authors report no relevant conflicts of interest for this article.
Data sharing statement: Data available from the corresponding author at sebastian.mueller@urz.uni-heidelberg.de.
STROBE statement: The authors have read the STROBE Statement—checklist of items, and the manuscript was prepared and revised according to the STROBE Statement—checklist of items.
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: Sebastian Mueller, PhD, Professor, Center for Alcohol Research, University Hospital Heidelberg, Im Neuenheimer Feld 350, Heidelberg 69120, Germany. sebastian.mueller@urz.uni-heidelberg.de
Received: March 27, 2023
Peer-review started: March 27, 2023
First decision: April 19, 2023
Revised: May 17, 2023
Accepted: June 12, 2023
Article in press: June 12, 2023
Published online: July 27, 2023
Core Tip

Core Tip: Intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy (ICP) is a rare but severe complication in both mothers and unborn children. In a large ICP cohort, we studied liver stiffness (LS) in detail using transient elastography, which is now widely used for non-invasive screening of liver cirrhosis within minutes. LS is significantly elevated in pregnancies with ICP, most likely owing to toxic bile acid accumulation and hepatocyte apoptosis. Interestingly, no correlation was observed with γ-glutamyl transferase. In association with conventional laboratory markers, LS provides a novel non-invasive tool to rapidly identify women at risk for pregnancy complications.