부산대학교 도서관

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) affects approximately 30% of the population worldwide. It is clinically important to identify cases of NASH because if left untreated, this can lead to disease progression and advanced fibrosis, which has a high mortality rate. There is still no established treatment for NAFLD partly because pathological evaluation, which has strong inter-rater variability, is used as an endpoint in clinical trials. Therefore, international efforts have been made to standardize the criteria for the pathological diagnosis and activity assessment of NASH, to develop treatment guidelines, to investigate appropriate surrogate markers for clinical trials, and to develop non-invasive biomarkers. We have recently reported serum markers that are useful in the diagnosis of NASH and liver fibrosis as well as predicting its prognosis. Lastly, MAFLD was recently proposed as a new term to replace NAFLD, which widely includes fatty liver disease, but a worldwide consensus has not yet been reached.