By Lucy Hicks
Liver transplant recipients with nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) who received grafts from older donors are at higher risk for post-transplant death, especially due to infection, according to a new study.
All-cause mortality was twice as high and death from an infectious cause was more than three times as high for patients with NASH who received liver grafts from octogenarian donors than for those who received a liver from someone younger than 50.
Read more in Medscape.
A recent study found that fecal microbiota-based screening may help detect early-stage pancreatic cancer.
Researchers reported that fecal metagenomic classifiers performed significantly better than saliva-based classifiers in identifying patients with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma. It was the top story in gastroenterology last week. Read more in Healio.
As liver transplants significantly increase among older patients, nonalcoholic steatohepatitis has become the most common reason for the procedure in this population, according to a study published in Hepatology Communications.
“Another study from our team, which in publication in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, suggests that the proportion of elderly patients in need of liver transplantation in the U.S. is sharply increasing,” study author Zobair M. Younossi MD, MPH, president of Inova Medicine Services and professor and chairman of the department of medicine at Inova Fairfax Medical Campus in Virginia, told Healio. Read more.