Retrospective Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2017. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Hepatol. Jun 18, 2017; 9(17): 791-796
Published online Jun 18, 2017. doi: 10.4254/wjh.v9.i17.791
Use of aspartate aminotransferase to platelet ratio to reduce the need for FibroScan in the evaluation of liver fibrosis
Stephanie Wong, Dep Huynh, Frank Zhang, Nam Q Nguyen
Stephanie Wong, Dep Huynh, Frank Zhang, Nam Q Nguyen, Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Royal Adelaide Hospital, Adelaide 5000, Australia
Dep Huynh, Frank Zhang, Nam Q Nguyen, Discipline of Medicine, University of Adelaide, Adelaide 5000, Australia
Author contributions: Wong S contributed to data acquisition, analysis of data, drafting of manuscript; Huynh D contributed to analysis of data, critical revisions to manuscript; Zhang F contributed to data acquisition and analysis of data; Nguyen NQ contributed to study concept and design, analysis of data, critical revisions to manuscript.
Institutional review board statement: The study was reviewed and approved by the Royal Adelaide Hospital Human Research Ethics Committee.
Informed consent statement: The need to obtain informed consent from subjects was waived by the Royal Adelaide Research Ethics Committee.
Conflict-of-interest statement: No conflict of interest to disclose from all authors.
Data sharing statement: No additional data available.
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: Nam Q Nguyen, Associate Professor, Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Royal Adelaide Hospital, North Terrace, Adelaide 5000, Australia. quocnam.nguyen@sa.gov.au
Telephone: +61-8-82224000 Fax: +61-8-82225885
Received: December 28, 2016
Peer-review started: December 29, 2016
First decision: February 4, 2017
Revised: March 6, 2017
Accepted: April 23, 2017
Article in press: April 24, 2017
Published online: June 18, 2017
Processing time: 167 Days and 18.8 Hours
Core Tip

Core tip: This is the first study to show that an aspartate aminotransferase to platelet ratio (APRI) score of 0.5 could potentially be used as a screening tool to predict the need for FibroScan in patients with hepatitis C or hepatitis B. Our study showed that an APRI score of 0.5 could reduce the need for FibroScan in 43% of the study cohort with high sensitivity.