IS IT STILL JUSTIFIED TO CONSIDER LIVER BIOPSY AS THE GOLD STANDARD

[stef2011]

http://www1.uegw10.uegf.org/guest/ID14c5615c480c19/AbstractView?ABSID=10961

i had two in my life, my mother two, my sister one and they all performed poorly for all of us giving lower damage than real one at least in one case, so i do believe it is not a gold standard at all

me and my sister are monitoring with fibroscan from a year and since the only mistake can be a result higher then the real damage we do prefer it by far, multuple readings every 6 months can give a much closer result to real damage than biopsy

[stef2011]

http://www.ihlpress.com/pdf%20files/hepdart09_presentations/liver/5_afdal_HepDart%202009%20Afdhal.pdf

fibrosis staging is an inexact and artificial system with doubtful relevance to clinical practice and significal potential for pitfalls in clinical decision making
stiffness is a biomarker that correlates to fibrosis but not to metavir scale

i did know that staging was just an observational method but i didn t know it was an artificial system to stage fibrosis, i thought it was able to see fibrosis directly, if not so stageing to 1-2-3 doesn t make sense at all

[hepbvictim]

Thanks for Sharing.

[stef2011]

http://www1.uegw10.uegf.org/guest/ID14c5615c480c19/AbstractView?ABSID=10961

CONCLUSION:
Our study shows that better LB fragments are obtained with Menghini needles, but only in approximately half of cases these fragments are optimal, while in approximately two thirds of the cases the fragments are satisfactory. In approximately 1/3 of LBs the tissue samples are inadequate for diagnosis, as they included less than 8 portal tracts. Therefore it is debatable whether liver biopsy is the real “gold standard” method for the evaluation of liver fibrosis.