APRI and FIB-4 performance to assess liver fibrosis against predefined Fibroscan values in chronic hepatitis C virus...

Chronic hepatitis C (CHC) infection can leads to chronic liver disease, fibrosis, then cirrhosis, and, finally, hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC); moreover, it is the most common indication for liver transplantation. Liver biopsy is still the gold standard method for the staging of liver fibrosis as it is an invasive procedure with complications. There are some noninvasive methods such as fibroscan that are now the investigation of choice; FIB-4 and aminotransferase to platelet ratio index (APRI) are other noninvasive tools to assess liver fibrosis by using aspartate aminotransferase (AST), alanine aminotransferase (ALT), platelet count, and age. This study aims to evaluate the efficacy and performance of FIB-4 and APRI against fibroscan in patients infected with the hepatitis C virus.

It is a cross-sectional study that was conducted in a tertiary health care center in Uttar Pradesh, India, from January 2017 to January 2020. Fibroscan was done for all patients. A blood sample was used to determine AST, ALT, and platelet count. FIB-4 and APRI were calculated from laboratory data.

187 of the 487 patients in the study have F0-F1 fibrosis, 69 have F2, 53 have F3 fibrosis, and 178 have cirrhosis. Based on receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis, single optimum cut-offs for diagnosing significant fibrosis and cirrhosis were 1.2 for APRI and 2.25 for FIB-4.

Compared with Fibroscan, APRI and FIB-4 showed good performance in detecting the patients without liver fibrosis as well as satisfactory performance in detecting significant fibrosis. These scores should be used in combination with other noninvasive scores for an accurate assessment of liver fibrosis.