Expert reviews clinical liver disease take-aways from DDW 2018

WASHINGTON — In this exclusive video perspective from Digestive Disease Week 2018, Steven L. Flamm, MD, chief of the Liver Program at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Illinois, reviews some of the important clinical presentations in liver disease from the meeting.

“As usual, there are presentations across the gamut of liver disease at DDW,” Flamm told Healio Gastroenterology and Liver Disease. “They include the topics of hepatitis B, hepatitis C, autoimmune hepatitis, liver cancer, liver transplantation and many other pertinent topics to your practice.”

Flamm further discussed long-term outcomes of patients with HCV-related cirrhosis, including hepatocellular carcinoma and mortality rates; liver transplantation, including transplantation for acute alcoholic hepatitis and use of HCV-positive donors; and autoimmune hepatitis.

“There are presentations on fatty liver and NASH, and chronic hepatitis B virus infection, although these presentations were talking about most of the time about products that are in development that will not affect your practice now but should in the relatively near future,” Flamm said. “I hope if you have patients with liver disease and you want up-to-date information, please look at the abstracts from the liver meeting that pertain to your problem and you’ll find information that will help your patients and help you in your clinical practice.”

Disclosure: Flamm reports he received consulting fees, grant or research support, or other financial benefit from AbbVie, Dova, Gilead, Intercept, Merck and Salix.