Copyright
©The Author(s) 2018. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastroenterol. Oct 14, 2018; 24(38): 4393-4402
Published online Oct 14, 2018. doi: 10.3748/wjg.v24.i38.4393
Published online Oct 14, 2018. doi: 10.3748/wjg.v24.i38.4393
Liver stiffness reversibly increases during pregnancy and independently predicts preeclampsia
Franziska J Ammon, Christof Sohn, Herbert Fluhr, Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg 69120, Germany
Anna Kohlhaas, Omar Elshaarawy, Johannes Mueller, Gabriele Fluhr, Sebastian Mueller, Department of Medicine and Center for Alcohol Research, Liver Disease and Nutrition, Salem Medical Center, University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg 69121, Germany
Thomas Bruckner, Institute of Medical Biometry und Informatics, University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg 69121, Germany
Author contributions: Fluhr H and Mueller S designed research; Ammon FJ, Kohlhaas A and Fluhr G performed measurements; Ammon FJ, Mueller J and Mueller S analyzed the data and wrote the paper; Elshaarawy O revised the paper; Bruckner T reviewed statistics; Elshaarawy O, Sohn C and Fluhr H reviewed the paper.
Supported by the Dietmar Hopp Foundation (in part, DFG) , No. MU 1373/9-1 .
Institutional review board statement: The study was approved by the Ethical Committee of the University of Heidelberg.
Informed consent statement: All participants of the study, or their legal guardians, provided written informed consent prior to study enrollment.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors have declared no conflicts of interest.
Data sharing statement: Dataset and other information are available from the corresponding author at sebastian.mueller@urz.uni-heidelberg.de. Patients gave informed consent before inclusion in the study; the presented data are anonymized and the risk of identification is very low.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (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: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Sebastian Mueller, MD, PhD, Professor, Department of Internal Medicine, Salem Medical Center and Center for Alcohol Research and Liver Disease, University of Heidelberg, Zeppelinstraße 11-33, Heidelberg 69121, Germany. sebastian.mueller@urz.uni-heidelberg.de
Telephone: +49-6221-483210 Fax: +49-6221-484494
Received: August 1, 2018
Peer-review started: August 1, 2018
First decision: August 24, 2018
Revised: September 20, 2018
Accepted: October 5, 2018
Article in press: October 5, 2018
Published online: October 14, 2018
Peer-review started: August 1, 2018
First decision: August 24, 2018
Revised: September 20, 2018
Accepted: October 5, 2018
Article in press: October 5, 2018
Published online: October 14, 2018
Core Tip
Core tip: Liver stiffness (LS) was measured by transient elastography during pregnancy in 537 healthy pregnant women without complications and in 62 women with pregnancy complications such as preeclampsia or intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy. Our results show that LS increases during pregnancy to levels above 6 kPa even in women without pregnancy complications and rapidly normalizes within 24 h after delivery. LS was significantly elevated in women with preeclampsia and, moreover, an independent predictor for preeclampsia in multivariate analysis. In conclusion, LS could be a novel non-invasive screening parameter to identify pregnant women at risk for complications of pregnancy.