S6 - E2 - MetALD Epidemiology, MASLD Mortality and a PCP "Unicorn"

00:00:00 - Surf's Up: Season 6 Episode 2

Surfing the MASH Tsunami continues its coverage of the AASLD Emerging Trends Conference on MASLD, MetALD and ALD. This week, the panelists focus on disease epidemiology and what it can teach us about the relative importance of alcohol and diet on disease progression. Our newsmaker, hepatology KOL and frequent Surfer Hannes Hagstrom, discusses what a recent paper demonstrates about the impact of MASLD on 15-year mortality and cause of death and how this information can improve patient care. Finally, our Expert, Shelbyville, Indiana internist Emily Ann Andeya, discusses her path from practicing internal medicine to focus on liver health (HINT: the common theme is insulin resistance).

00:04:40 - Introduction

Host Roger Green briefly describes this episode's three sections and one key lesson from each.

00:05:49 - Roundtable: Highlights from the AASLD Emerging Trends Conference, Part 2 

The second portion of our Roundtable focuses on relative impact of alcohol and diet on disease progression and overall mortality and morbidity. It starts with Aleksander Krag sharing the highlights of his epidemiology presentation at the Emerging Trends Conference. Dr. Krag points out that while the vast majority of SLD patient live with MASLD, the vast majority of hospitalized patients and those living with late-stage cirrhosis live with ALD. Similarly, for the average patient, living with MetALD is more lethal than living with MASLD. Aleksander points out another challenge in defining where a patient lives on the ALD -> MetALD -> MASLD spectrum: patients' level of alcohol consumption is likely to change over time and many ALD or MetALD cirrhosis patients stop drinking altogether. The rest of this section considers the importance of stigma in correctly classifying patients and why genetics may become key to a message that minimizes patient stigma.

00:25:50 - Newsmaker: Hepatology Researcher and KOL Hannes Hagstrom of the Karolinska Institute joins Roger to discuss cause-specific mortality in Swedish MASLD patients

On March 24, the Journal of Hepatology posted a paper titled Cause-specific mortality in 13,099 patients with metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease in Sweden. Co-author Hannes Hagstrom joins Roger to discuss the paper's key findings and implications for care. The key finding: living with MASLD leads to a significant increase in 15-year mortality. The most frequent cause of death among MASLD patients is cardiovascular disease, but the greatest increases in relative risk were due to HCC (HR ~ 35) and extra-hepatic cancers (HR ~ 26). Hannes points out that these results can serve as the beginning of a process where physicians can compute the risk at which individual patients place themselves through diet or alcohol patterns, which can aid patient understanding of the disease.

00:44:22 - Experts: Internist Emily Ann Andeya discusses how she developed the commitment to treating liver disease that made her a "unicorn" in the words of one AASLD panelist and also brought her to attend the Emerging Trends Conference last month

Roger first met Emily Ann Andeya when she asked a question at a session of last fall's The Liver Meeting, and again at the Emerging Trends Conference, where Emily and her colleagues were likely the only primary care physicians in the room. Emily describes the path by which she went from wanting to be a cardiologist during medical school in the Philippines through years of nursing in the US to primary care practice and, how, focus on the liver as a key to overall metabolic health. Listen as Emily explains the importance of understanding insulin resistance in her transition, and how her vision affects the way she and her colleagues practice, the goals they set, and the exceptional levels of care they achieve.

01:08:56 Business Report