Surfing the MASH Tsunami

S5 SPECIAL 2 - Reviewing EASL Congress: Louise Campbell I

July 19, 2024 HEP Dynamics LLC Season 5 Episode 23

This week, Surfing the MASH Tsunami looks back on interviews Roger Green conducted during the EASL Congress itself. This conversation with SurfingMASH co-host and Tawazun Health Founder and Clinical Director Louise Campbell took place on the first day of the Congress.

Roger's first interview with Louise took place at the end of Thursday, the opening day of the formal Congress and the first day of research presentations and posters. She starts by describing the "really nice vibe" of the meeting, dampened by the fact that Stephen Harrison was not there, and is no longer with us.

The first session Louise chose to discuss was the previous day's Patient Advocate session. To her, the key point was to learn a key question that every provider should share with every patient once a year. She mentioned briefly the one presentation from the day's General Session she was able to attend, a retrospective analysis of the predictive value of VCTE.

Next, Louise discussed two sessions she attended that delivered powerful, somewhat novel messages. The first was a symposium sponsored by Novo Nordisk that looked at using the liver "to manage cardiometabolic side" through the liver "rather than focusing on liver disease." The second was the "Healthy Livers, Healthy Lives" presentation that presented "very startling figures" about healthcare costs and lack of productivity in the US and how and why India has targeted this disease aggressively. 

After Louise and Roger both commented on the building momentum in MASLD and mentioned why they believe this is happening, Louise noted how many conversations about AI and quicker population detection were occurring despite the lack of ability to act on these today. This let Roger recall his major takeaway from the Preview episode (S5 E17), which was the emerging importance of data development and large datasets. He mentioned a paper from the Karolinska Institute that Hannes Hagstrom discussed in that episode.