S3-E32 - Days 1-3 of ILC 2022: The Value of FIB-4 and In-Person Meetings

Send us Fan MailThe International Liver Congress (#ILC2022) is the first major hepatology Congress to be held in person since the start of the pandemic (smaller, but very valuable, meetings like NASH-TAG, LiverCONNECT and Paris NASH have taken place with an in-person component, but the International Liver Congress and The Liver Meeting have not).The conversation takes place against the backdrop of a live Congress, which means background noise, challenges finding a meeting location and more background noise than you will find during a studio episode.Once everyone had settled in, this episode covered a range of topics, the most important of which revolved around the value of FIB-4 and the need for integrated, strategic thinking about care. The FIB-4 discussion addressed both strengths and weaknesses of the test, which is inexpensive and produces a relatively high level of false-positive tests. One key point from both Zobair and Michelle: in the US, the quality and standards organizations such as NCQA and HEDIS, should include FIB-4 screening and automatic EHR inclusion as a quality criterion with a point value in the scoring criteria. The discussion allowed the group to discuss several other important issues from the day's events. There was limited discussion of drug trials since most of the major trials will be presented on Saturday. Listen to Episodes 33 and 34 for more feedback on those presentations.At the end of the session, Michelle Long announced that she is leaving academia in July to join Novo Nordisk and get involved full-time in helping her new employer develop good drugs and shape overall treatment paradigms and pathways.This episode is sponsored by DiaPharma. DiaPharma is proud to support Surfing the NASH Tsunami in its activities to raise awareness of,  and foster discussions about,  the NASH epidemic.   DiaPharma offers noninvasive mechanistic biomarkers,  like CK18, that provide early biologically plausible indications of changes in disease activity for use in NASH drug development studies.   For research use only,  In the US and Canada,  and not for use in diagnostic procedures.