Usefulness of the Fibrosis-3 index in patients with hepatitis C

Noninvasive liver fibrosis prediction scores are crucial for evaluating liver disease progression. It was previously reported that the newly proposed Fibrosis-3 index (FIB-3 index) is useful in cases of metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease. In this study, we investigated whether it is useful in cases of hepatitis C, a viral liver disease.

We evaluated the liver fibrosis prediction ability of both the FIB-3 and FIB-4 indices by age-group in 517 patients with treatment-naïve hepatitis C who underwent liver biopsy.

The FIB-3 and FIB-4 indices linearly increased with fibrosis progression in patients with hepatitis C virus infection. Receiver operating characteristic analysis revealed no significant difference between the two indices in predicting advanced fibrosis (≥F3) and moderate fibrosis (≥F2). The FIB-3 index showed significantly higher accuracy (47.8%) in predicting advanced fibrosis in patients aged ≥70 years than the FIB-4 index (28.3%) using a single cutoff value derived from the Youden index for the entire cohort.

The FIB-3 index proved useful for predicting liver fibrosis and prognosis in patients with hepatitis C, with performance comparable to that of the FIB-4 index. Moreover, its ability to use a single cutoff value across age-groups may offer a clinical advantage.