Some patients underwent the detection of the two markers at their local hospital, and asked me about whether or not the results could predict the presence of liver fibrosis. I thought that the answer was "No".
Sinusoidal changes and increased collagen IV deposition (both intra- and extracellular) are early markers of subclinical liver damage and of the start of ultrastructural fibroplastic transformation. They can be found in various scenarios as cholestasis, liver metastases,bowel obstruction etc. Whether this ultrastructural changes will further progress to clinically significant liver fibrosis is unclear. We do not observed clinically progression of fibrosis if the primary damaging process is resolved. So your answer is probably right, if we talk about clinically important fibrosis.
Recently, I have read a relatively old paper about this issue (Xie SB, Yao JL, Zheng SS, Yao CL, Zheng RQ. The levels of serum fibrosis marks and morphometric quantitative measurement of hepatic fibrosis. Hepatobiliary Pancreat Dis Int. 2002 May;1(2):202-6. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14607739).
The authors concluded that "the serum levels of hyaluronic acid (HA), procollagen type III (PCIII), collagen type IV (CIV) were in consistent with the degree of hepatic fibrosis, and the determination of these marks is valuable for detecting hepatic fibrosis."
If so, my answer might be wrong?
I have read your review paper with great interest. Your paper is very useful for me. Recently, I have collected our data in 228 cirrhotic patients without HCC who were tested for 4 serum liver fibrosis markers, including HA, LN, PIIINP, and CIV (unpublished data).
I found that HA, LN, and CIV were significantly correlated with Child-Pugh score. Additionally, it should be noted that LN and CIV were significantly correlated with sex (female had a significantly higher level of LN and CIV than male).
But I could not explain the detailed reasons for this phenomenon.
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