Lea Ladegaard Grønkjær

The mental health of patients with liver diseases is often overlooked when assessing their overall health and planning care and treatment. The aim of this study was to assess anxiety, depression, hopelessness, quality of life, and the perception of stigmatization in a large cohort of patients with chronic liver disease of different aetiology and severity, as well as to identify predictors associated with mental health disorders. A total of 340 patients completed a survey assessing mental health using the Beck Anxiety Inventory, the Beck Hopelessness Scale, and the Major Depression Inventory. Quality of life was measured with the Chronic Liver Disease Questionnaire and the European Quality-of-Life visual analogue scale. To assess stigmatization, validated questions from the Danish Nationwide Survey of Patient Experiences were used. Predictors associated with anxiety, hopelessness, and depression were analysed using univariable and multivariable logistic regression analyses. Overall, 15% of the patients had moderate or severe anxiety, 3% had moderate or pronounced hopelessness, and 8% had moderate or severe depression. The prevalence of all three was highest in patients with cirrhosis and was associated with a low quality of life. More patients with cirrhosis had perceived stigmatization compared to patients with liver disease without cirrhosis, which affected their self-perception, and more than one-third of the patients refrained from telling others about their liver disease. The results emphasize the need for increased focus on mental health problems and awareness on preventing the discrimination of patients with liver disease.

Background and Aims: Reliable noninvasive biomarkers are an unmet clinical need for the diagnosis of NASH. This study investigates the diagnostic accuracy of the circulating triggering receptor expressed on myeloid cells 2 (plasma TREM2) as a biomarker for NASH in patients with NAFLD and elevated liver stiffness. Approach and Results: We collected cross‐sectional, clinical data including liver biopsies from a derivation ( n = 48) and a validation cohort ( n = 170) of patients with elevated liver stiffness measurement (LSM ≥ 8.0 kPa). Patients with NAFLD activity scores (NAS) ≥4 were defined as having NASH. Plasma TREM2 levels were significantly elevated in patients with NASH of the derivation cohort, with an area under the receiver operating characteristics curve (AUROC) of 0.92 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.84–0.99). In the validation cohort, plasma TREM2 level increased approximately two‐fold in patients with NASH, and a strong diagnostic accuracy was confirmed (AUROC, 0.83; 95% CI, 0.77–0.89; p < 0.0001). Plasma TREM2 levels were associated with the individual histologic features of NAS: steatosis, lobular inflammation, and ballooning ( p < 0.0001), but only weakly with fibrosis stages. Dual cutoffs for rule‐in and rule‐out were explored: a plasma TREM2 level of ≤38 ng/ml was found to be an optimal NASH rule‐out cutoff (sensitivity 90%; specificity 52%), whereas a plasma TREM2 level of ≥65 ng/ml was an optimal NASH rule‐in cutoff (specificity 89%; sensitivity 54%). Conclusions: Plasma TREM2 is a plausible individual biomarker that can rule‐in or rule‐out the presence of NASH with high accuracy and thus has the potential to reduce the need for liver biopsies and to identify patients who are eligible for clinical trials in NASH.