Active clinical trials for "Liver Cirrhosis"

Patients with liver cirrhosis have an increased risk to develop life-threatening complications such as spontaneous bacterial peritonitis (SBP). Impairment in the intestinal barrier, changes in numbers and composition of the intestinal microbiota and alterations in immune defenses have been suggested to be involved in liver cirrhosis and its complications. Dysfunction in the intestinal barrier for example results in the ongoing passage of toxic substances from the gastrointestinal tract that may damage the liver, leading to oxidative stress, inflammation and eventually liver cirrhosis. In addition, bacterial translocation is considered a key step in the development of spontaneous infections, mainly SBP, in patients with liver cirrhosis. The investigators hypothesize that patients with decompensated liver cirrhosis have a more impaired intestinal epithelial barrier and altered intestinal microbiota than patients with compensated liver cirrhosis.

Primary biliary cirrhosis (PBC) is a disease of the liver, which predominantly affects women. It causes slowly progressive liver disease, which eventually causes liver failure, requiring a liver transplant. Several different studies of large patient cohorts indicate that the cause of this disease is likely due to a combination of factors including genetic and environmental. PBC is associated with several other "autoimmune diseases" - recently a gene has been identified to be abnormal in individuals with another autoimmune liver disease, namely rheumatoid arthritis. This gene usually tells the body when to switch off an immune response. This study plans to identify whether individuals diagnosed with PBC have a similar abnormality in this gene called protein Tyrosine Phosphatase.

The aim of this study is to validate and develop a new diagnostic and prognostic approach for assessment of liver function in children and adolescents with acute liver failure and chronic liver insufficiency. A carefully selected panel of functional and genomic tests along with diagnostic imaging and analysis of the microbiota will be performed in children and adolescents with acute liver failure and chronic liver insufficiency at Rigshospitalet. The tests will be performed in a serial manner in order to detect changes in outcomes. The study is an unblinded descriptive study, and approximately 20 patients with acute liver failure and 100 patients with chronic liver disease will be included in the project. This study will be the first of it's kind worldwide. The investigators expect the study to improve future diagnostic and prognostic accuracy and help the clinicians in identifying those patients in which the liver will regenerate itself, from those patients in which a liver transplantation will be lifesaving. Furthermore this study aims to help the clinicians in defining the optimal time for pediatric liver transplant in a narrow window of opportunity.

The purpose of this retrospective study was to investigate the diagnostic performance of 2D-SWE for predicting the presence of esophageal varices and high-risk varices in patients with liver cirrhosis.

In previous studies, the investigators used retrospective analysis of cases of acute upper gastrointestinal bleeding in patients with liver cirrhosis from the Fifth Medical Center of the General Hospital of Beijing PLA, China from January 2018 to May 2019. The investigators performed univariate and multivariate analyses of rebleeding risk and death risk based on all data. Then, based on the analysis of 85% of the sampled data, the investigators randomly selected 85% of the patient data to build a model, and then used the remaining 15% of the patient data for model validation. Re-bleeding risk scores and death risk scores were established, respectively. This study intends to prospectively verify the two risk scoring systems described above. After statistical calculations, about 500 patients with liver cirrhosis who plan to undergo emergency gastroscopy for acute upper gastrointestinal bleeding within the next 5 months at the Fifth Medical Center of Beijing General Hospital of China performed in adult patients. The investigators will exclude patients with incomplete or lost follow-up records. Perform patient self-control,using the existing upper gastrointestinal bleeding risk scores (AIMS65, Rockall, and Blatchford) and the previous scoring system model separately, compared with the actual rebleeding rate and mortality for comparison. To verify and revise the rebleeding risk score and death risk score that the investigators constructed earlier.The data were statistical processed by a professional statistician. The establishment of an acute upper gastrointestinal bleeding rebleeding and death risk scoring system for patients with liver cirrhosis can help distinguish patients with high or low risk of rebleeding or death to determine the patient's treatment needs.

Gastroesophageal varices occurs in approximately half of the patients with liver cirrhosis. Variceal bleeding is the most common lethal complication directly from cirrhotic portal hypertension. The golden standard for diagnosing gastroesophageal varices and evaluating the risk of variceal bleeding is the esophagogastroduodenoscopy. According to the Baveno VI consensus, for those with high-risk varices (varies needing treatment), either non-selective beta blockers or endoscopic band ligation is recommended for the prevention of the first variceal bleeding. However, the invasiveness and uncomfortableness during the esophagogastroduodenoscopy procedure has hindered its routine use in clinical practice, especially in compensated cirrhotic patients. The important role of transient elastography for defining the presence of high-risk varices was highlighted in the Baveno VI consensus workshop that cirrhotic patients with a liver stiffness measurement (LSM) of less than 20 kPa and a platelet count of greater than 150,000/μL can avoid screening endoscopy. In addition, transient elastography-based models (e.g. LSM combined with platelet count, liver stiffness spleen diameter-to-platelet score) were shown to have potentials in distinguish the absence of high-risk gastroesophageal varices. However, this cutoff value of LSM was validated mainly in cohorts with alcoholic or hepatitis C virus dominated cirrhosis. The unmet need is a precise cutoff to rule out high-risk varices in hepatitis B virus dominated cirrhosis, which is an outstanding issue in Asia-Pacific population. FibroTouch (Hisky Medical Technologies Co. Ltd, Wuxi, China) is a new-generation of transient elastography based on a two-dimensional image-guided system to ensure the precise orientation. In the present study, the investigators aim to conduct an international prospective diagnostic trial with 16 sites to develop and validate the diagnostic performance of FibroTouch-based models for assessing risk of gastroesophageal varices bleeding in compensated cirrhosis.

The objective of this study is to determine what influences the patient and caregiver perception of care, and if this perception associates with the percentage of and what quality metrics are being met and outcomes. The investigators also plan to capture the cost of providing quality metrics and the cost of monitoring adherence to quality metrics.

Due to providing valuable clinical information while being minimally invasive, blood-based testing will most likely be a prerequisite for future large-scale screening of high-risk populations. As a variety of pathological processes, including carcinogenesis, may cause changes in both the concentration and the structure and spatial arrangement of body biomolecules, the spectroscopic analysis of blood-based derivatives appears to be an appropriate tool for the early detection thereof. The differences observed in the spectral response of healthy individuals and patients may also be specific to a particular type/stage of the disease and, thus, may serve as a reliable diagnostic marker. In order to find sufficiently specific and sensitive biomarkers of early stages of degenerative and cancerous diseases, the co-applicant group at the Department of Analytical Chemistry, University of Chemistry and Technology Prague (UCT Prague), developed a unique approach for the spectroscopic analysis of blood plasma. Using the highly specialized, structure-sensitive methods of chiroptical spectroscopy (electronic circular dichroism - ECD, Raman optical activity - ROA) combined with conventional infrared (IR) and Raman spectroscopy, the first pilot studies yielded promising results with respect to the identification of spectral markers for pancreatic cancer, colon cancer and type 1 diabetes mellitus. In addition, metabolomics appears to be a very progressive approach to finding potentially suitable molecules to distinguish between healthy and cancer-affected individuals. Therefore, the investigators believes that this multimodal approach will allow for the identification of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). In our research, the focus will be on the identification of novel biomarkers in blood plasma that would exhibit sufficient sensitivity and specificity to detect early and potentially curable HCC stages, and that would be potentially useful for routine screening of this disease in well-defined at-risk groups.

Alcohol is the common precipitating factor for both cirrhosis of liver as well as alcohol related chronic pancreatitis. However, in real life clinical setting, clinicians do not frequently see many cases of symptomatic pancreatitis in patients who present with features of cirrhosis of liver. On the contrary, in some patients presenting with alcohol related chronic pancreatitis, evidence of cirrhosis of liver is observed on imaging without other clinical features of cirrhosis.

Ascites is a frequent complication of liver cirrhosis, initial treatment consists on diuretics intake, however, as the disease progresses this complication becomes more severe, consequently other therapeutic options are used. Paracentesis is indicated when severe ascites is present and it should be accompanied by albumin infusion. Nutritional status is generally affected in patients with liver cirrhosis, even more patients with severe ascites show decreased energy intake due to gastric compression.