Grant: Project Grant

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), commonly called fatty liver, has become the leading cause of chronic liver disease in North America. It is estimated that up to 24% of Canadian population has NAFLD. NAFLD will become the main cause of end stage liver disease, liver cancer, liver transplantation, and death related to liver disease. Individuals with diabetes, lipid disorders, or who are overweight / obese are at high risk of having NAFLD. The severity of NAFLD depends on the stage of liver scarring, known as fibrosis. To confirm that a patient has advanced fibrosis a liver biopsy, a complicated and intrusive procedure, is needed. Recently, multiple techniques to avoid liver biopsy have been developed, including an ultrasound-based approach called shear wave elastography which can accurately rule out advanced liver fibrosis. In Calgary, our team has established the first program in North America to make it easy for family doctors to assess people with NAFLD by shearwave elastography to rule out advanced fibrosis. Patients with suspected advanced fibrosis, will be referred to a liver specialist for further testing to confirm their liver fibrosis stage. In our proposed project, we aim to develop a clinical decision support tool to help primary care physicians identifying NAFLD patients with advanced liver fibrosis. This tool will be developed from our large NAFLD cohort. We will present our clinical decision support tools as a webpage risk calculator, smart phone application, and paper-based risk tabulation. This project is novel and essential to meet the urgent and growing need to accurately identify NAFLD patients with advanced liver fibrosis to provide them with accessible and timely health care.