The Usefulness of Non-Invasive Liver Stiffness Measurements by Fibroscan in Predicting Clinically Significant Portal Hypertension in Cirrhotic Patients

Background: Liver stiffness measurement (LSM) has proposed as a non-invasive method for estimating the severity of fibrosis and the complications of cirrhosis. Measurement of the hepatic venous pressure gradient (HVPG) is the gold standard for assessing the presence of portal hypertension, but its invasiveness limits its clinical application. The aim of our study is to investigate if LSM could predict the size of Esophageal varices (EV) in patients with liver cirrhosis to limit upper endoscopic procedures only to those patients that really need it (patients with large EV or EV at risk for bleeding). Methods: Our retrospective study includes 46 cirrhotic patients over a period of 40 months between January 2019 and April 2022, at the Service of Digestive Functional Explorations of Hepato-gastroenterology of the University hospital Ibn-Sina of RABAT, all patients underwent a liver stiffness measurement by Transient elastography FibroScan. Results: Of the 46 cirrhotic patients included in this study, with a mean age of 58.5(21-90) years, 18 (39.1%) of patients were male and 28(60.9%) were female. the predominant etiology of cirrhosis was chronic viral hepatitis C 20 (43.5%). The area under the ROC curve of the diagnosis of large EVs (EV≥II) was 0.724 (95%CI). The optimal cut-off of elasticity was 20.5 for this purpose, with a sensitivity of 66.7%, specificity of 94.74%. Conclusions: these results indicate that Transient elastography FibroScan is a reliable, non-invasive method to assess portal hypertension and can be used for the screening and diagnosis of clinically significant portal hypertension.