S5 - E9.6 - From The Vault: An Earlier Look At Screening In The Clinical Care Pathway

This conversation comes from our coverage of The EASL Congress, 2023, when Sven Francque and Ian Rowe joined Jörn Schattenberg and Roger Green to consider primary care screening at the top of the Clinical Care Pathway. The original conversation had a robust write-up: 

Ian starts this conversation by pointing to unmet needs in the primary care setting for disease identification. He refers to a related presentation of interest from Vincent Wong titled A clinical care pathway to detect advanced liver disease in patients with type 2 diabetes through automated fibrosis score calculation and electronic reminder messages: a randomized controlled trial. Ian suggests that this study proves both the value of working to identify more patients and the considerable amount of work remaining in this area. The group goes on to discuss what the implications of this study are for treatment in primary care both now and into the future of patient care. In particular, Jörn elucidates the value of FIB-4 not only as a screening tool for liver-related outcomes, but also as a predictor of cardiovascular risk and all-cause mortality. Secondly, Jörn notes that when a NASH therapy becomes available, "the granularity of picking up those patients will be higher" and physicians will be more motivated to take action provided that they have both a screening tool and available treatment to prescribe. This leads to discussion around the differences between hepatology and private medicine practices and management of a population-level disease. Ian raises the question around how frequent should testing be performed in the primary care setting for different pathways.