In Liver international : official journal of the International Association for the Study of the Liver
BACKGROUND & AIMS : There is an unmet clinical need for non-invasive tests to diagnose nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and individual fibrosis stages. We aimed to test whether urine protein panels could be used to identify NAFLD, NAFLD with fibrosis (stage F≥1), and NAFLD with significant fibrosis (stage F≥2).
METHODS : We collected urine samples from 100 patients with biopsy-confirmed NAFLD and 40 healthy volunteers and proteomics and bioinformatics analyses were performed in this derivation cohort. Diagnostic models were developed for detecting NAFLD (UPNAFLD model), NAFLD with fibrosis (UPfibrosis model), or NAFLD with significant fibrosis (UPsignificant fibrosis model). Subsequently, the derivation cohort was divided into training and testing sets to evaluate the efficacy of these diagnostic models. Finally, in a separate independent validation cohort of 100 patients with biopsy-confirmed NAFLD and 45 healthy controls, urinary enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay analyses were undertaken to validate the accuracy of these newly diagnostic models.
RESULTS : The UPfibrosis model and the UPsignificant fibrosis model showed an AUROC of 0.863 (95% CI: 0.725-1.000) and 0.858 (95% CI: 0.712-1.000) in the training set; and 0.837 (95% CI: 0.711-0.963) and 0.916 (95% CI: 0.825-1.000) in the testing set, respectively. The UPNAFLD model showed excellent diagnostic performance and the area under the receiver operator characteristic curve (AUROC) exceeded 0.90 in the derivation cohort. In the independent validation cohort, the AUROC for all three of the above diagnostic models exceeded 0.80.
CONCLUSIONS : Our newly developed models constructed from urine protein biomarkers have good accuracy for non-invasively diagnosing liver fibrosis in NAFLD.
Feng Gong, Zhang Xiaoxun, Zhang Liangjun, Liu Wen-Yue, Geng Shi, Yuan Hai-Yang, Sha Jun-Cheng, Wang Xiao-Dong, Sun Dan-Qin, Targher Giovanni, Byrne Christopher D, Zheng Tian-Lei, Ye Feng, Zheng Ming-Hua, Chai Jin
2023-Mar-16
Diagnosis, Fibrosis, Liver biopsy, NAFLD, Urinary proteomics
