Active clinical trials for "Liver Diseases"

Liver fibrosis is an important public health problem, with a substantial morbidity and mortality due to progression to cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. All causes of chronic liver disease may lead to fibrosis. The traditional diagnostic approach requires a biopsy for assessing the severity of liver disease prior to therapy. However, liver biopsy has several limitations: cost, sampling error, and procedure-related morbidity and mortality. Considering the high prevalence of viral hepatitis and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, a condition often associated with obesity and type 2 diabetes, there is an urgent need for noninvasive screening, diagnosis and monitoring strategies of chronic liver disease severity. Our team has the expertise to investigate ultrasound-based and magnetic resonance-based elastographic methods for the noninvasive staging of liver fibrosis. The primary objective of this cross-sectional study is to compare the sensitivity of elastographic methods for detecting histology-determined significant fibrosis. The secondary objectives are to compare the diagnostic accuracy of these elastographic methods and the influence of potential confounders (inflammation, steatosis and iron deposition) on their diagnostic accuracy.

Optimizing patient survival and organ utility is a constant struggle for the liver transplant community. Despite rigorous cardiovascular evaluation before liver transplantation cardiovascular events are one of the leading causes of post-transplant morbidity and mortality in both early and late post transplant periods. Poor performance on measures of cardiopulmonary fitness has been associated with worse outcomes in liver transplant candidates. The investigators seek to determine the feasibility of obtaining measures of cardiopulmonary performance in liver transplant candidates from standard cardiopulmonary exercise testing (CPET) and from a modified 3 minute step test and to determine whether the 3 minute step test is suitable for the assessment of cardiopulmonary fitness in a future outcome study.

Organ transplantation has a special place in the medical field. It symbolizes a medicine whose limits always seem to be repelled. Because transplantation is unusual, it places people in front of outstanding issues which he has to cope with his personality and history. Factors involved in the psychology of patient presenting with graft are past and present psychic functioning, object relations, experience of transplantation itself and quality of social environment. Before or after graft defense mechanisms can be so intense that they can make the patient unable to overcome the graft. Yet as a pathological mechanism that denial was considered beneficial provided it is short. The aim of this study is to evaluate on psychopathological influence of psychological defense mechanisms used by liver transplant patients on their somatic psychological and social outcome.

Vascular inflammation is a key factor in both the pathogenesis and outcome of atherosclerosis. 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) positron emission tomography (PET) is a promising tool for identifying and quantifying vascular inflammation within atherosclerotic plaques. Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is closely associated with many cardiometabolic risk factors. NAFLD can be detected by measuring liver fat accumulation using computed tomography (CT). Also epicardial adipose tissue (EAT) volume as determined by computed tomography (CT) is an independent marker of cardiovascular events in the general population. Therefore, the purpose of this investigators study is to compare the NAFLD severity and EAT volume with FDG uptake measured by PET/CT.

This is a registry of data collected from patient records, both of those who have a condition which may require transplantation and those who have undergone transplantation of the liver, kidney and/or pancreas.

This study aims to determine the repeatability and reproducibility of Quantitative Magnetic Resonance Cholangiopancreatography (MRCP). Imaging scientists at Perspectum Diagnostics have developed a hessian-based mathematical model to enhance conventional MRCP to a 3D geometric model of the biliary tree, 'Quantitative MRCP'. This enables advanced quantitative measurement of bile duct width, orientation, branching point and curvative metrics. The technology has been validated against 3D printed phantoms for accuracy, and early clinical research has demonstrated the technology has potential for clinical impact, with improvement in radiologist performance versus conventional non-enhanced MRCP imaging (Vikal et al 2017). Quantitative MRCP aims to act as a tool to not only improve assessment of the current status of the biliary tree, but also act as a mechanism to track change within the ducts. Thus, it must be established that any change between scans is due to change in the physiology of the individual and not due to a quirk or fault of the technology. In order to achieve this a series of scans will be performed on an individual over a short period of time, for which the condition of the biliary tree within that individual can be assumed to be constant. Between each scan, subject and coil repositioning will occur. The study will recruit a group of adult volunteers, from both diseased groups and healthy groups in order to achieve a range of physiological biliary metrics.

The aim of this study is to assess the role of portal hypertension of peptic ulcer disease in liver cirrhosis and chronic hepatitis.

The objectives of this study are: To evaluate the ability of the Methacetin Breath Test (MBT) to detect hepatic decompensation events To evaluate the relationship between liver Biopsy and clinical outcome and show that the MBT has a better predictive ability of clinical outcome than liver biopsy. To evaluate the ability of the MBT to predict each of the individual liver related complications.

This is a prospective, multicenter, non-interventional, observational study of a cohort with a biological plasma and urine samples collection for the study of prognosis factors of cardiac complications after liver transplantation

The purpose of this study is to compare the severity of NAFLD in diabetic patients to that in non-diabetic patients.