What is the performance of the Aspartate Aminotransferase to platelets Ratio Index in patients With Chronic Liver Disease?

At present, liver biopsy is still the standard in assessing liver fibrosis, especially in patients with chronic viral hepatitis. However, biopsy is invasive and carries the risk of serious complications. In addition, the accuracy of liver biopsy is limited as a result of intraand interobserver variability and sampling error. Several noninvasive direct and indirect serum markers (such as Fibrotest®, Fibrometer®, and Hepascore®) have been developed and proposed for the noninvasive prediction of significant fibrosis and cirrhosis, especially in patients with chronic hepatitis C (1). These methods have been validated in naïve patients with chronic hepatitis C but have been proposed for the diagnosis of liver fibrosis in chronic hepatitis B, alcohol cirrhosis, and nASH. Another index is the aspartate aminotransferase to platelet radio index (ApRI), which has been reported to identify patients with hepatic fibrosis and cirrhosis (2). The retrospective study by Yilmaz et al. (3) assesses the diagnostic ability of the ApRI with 207 patients with chronic hepatitis B, 108 with chronic hepatitis C, and 140 with nAFLD. Receiving operating characteristics (RoC) Copyright c 2011 Kowsar M. P. Co. All rights reserved.