Acute-on-chronic liver failure: A comparison of three different diagnostic criteria

Different criteria are applied for the diagnosis of acute-on-chronic liver failure (ACLF). Our aim was to compare the performance of different ACLF diagnostic criteria for predicting mortality.

This was a prospective cohort study of adult cirrhotic patients admitted to a tertiary hospital for acute decompensation (AD) of cirrhosis. The evaluated outcome was mortality at 28 and 90 days, according to the different ACLF diagnostic criteria: Chronic Liver Failure Consortium (CLIF-C), Asian Pacific Association for the Study of the Liver-ACLF Research Consortium (AARC) and North American Consortium for the Study of End-Stage Liver Disease (NACSELD). Prognostic performance was evaluated using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves.

146 patients were included. 43 (29.5%) with ACLF according to CLIF-C definition, 14 (9.6%) with ACLF by AARC definition, and 6 (4.1%) by NACSELD definition. According to Kaplan-Meier survival analyses median survival of patients with ACLF by CLIF-C definition was 27.0 days, median survival of patients with ACLF by AARC definition was 27.0 days, and median survival of patients with ACLF by NACSELD definition was 4.0 days. The areas under the ROC curves for performance evaluation in predicting mortality at 28 days for CLIF-C, AARC and NACSELD criteria were, respectively, 0.710, 0.560 and 0.561 (p=0.002). Regarding 90-day mortality, the areas under the ROC curves were 0.760, 0.554 and 0.555 respectively (p<0.001).

ACLF definition proposed by CLIF-C had better performance in predicting mortality at 28 and 90 days when compared to criteria proposed by AARC and NACSELD.