Usefulness of simple noninvasive biochemical markers of liver fibrosis for screening of chronic liver disease and cirrhosis

Abstract

We evaluated clinical utility of the fibrosis index based on the four factors (FIB-4) and the aspartate aminotransferase to platelet ratio index (APRI) for screening of chronic liver disease (CLD) and liver cirrhosis (LC). Diagnoses were extracted from the electronic medical records. Among 1194 patients except of acute illness, 318 had CLD and 48 had LC. The areas under the receiver operating characteristic curves of FIB-4 and APRI for predicting LC were 0.913 and 0.897, respectively, while those for predicting CLD were 0.630 and 0.672, respectively. With FIB-4 3.25 and APRI 1.0 for the cut off values to predict LC, the diagnostic accuracies were 91.5%, 94.2%, respectively. FIB-4 and APRI were considered useful for screening of CLD with advanced fibrosis.