• Medicine · Sep 2020

    Observational Study

    Validating candidate biomarkers for different stages of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

    • Reem Al-Qarni, Muhammad Iqbal, Maram Al-Otaibi, Faisal Al-Saif, Assim A Alfadda, Hisham Alkhalidi, Fahad Bamehriz, and Mazen Hassanain.
    • Department of Physiology.
    • Medicine (Baltimore). 2020 Sep 4; 99 (36): e21463.

    AbstractNon-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is a common chronic condition caused by the accumulation of fat in the liver. NAFLD may range from simple steatosis to advanced cirrhosis, and affects more than 1 billion people around the world. To date, there has been no effective treatment for NAFLD. In this study, we evaluated the expression of 4 candidate NAFLD biomarkers to assess their possible applicability in the classification and treatment of the disease.Twenty-six obese subjects, who underwent bariatric surgery, were recruited and their liver biopsies obtained. Expression of 4 candidate biomarker genes, PNPLA3, COL1A1, PPP1R3B, and KLF6 were evaluated at gene and protein levels by RT-qPCR and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), respectively.A significant increase in the levels of COL1A1 protein (P = .03) and PNPLA3 protein (P = .03) were observed in patients with fibrosis-stage NAFLD compared to that in patients with steatosis-stage NAFLD. However, no significant differences were found in abundance of PPP1R3B and KLF6 proteins or at the gene level for any of the candidate.This is the first study, to our knowledge, to report on the expression levels of candidate biomarker genes for NAFLD in the Saudi population. Although PNPLA3 and PPP1R3B had been previously suggested as biomarkers for steatosis and KLF6 as a possible marker for the fibrosis stage of NAFLD, our results did not support these findings. However, other studies that had linked PNPLA3 to fibrosis in advanced NAFLD supported our current finding of high PNPLA3 protein in patients with fibrosis. Additionally, our results support COL1A1 protein as a potential biomarker for the fibrosis stage of NAFLD, and indicate its use in the screening of patients with NAFLD. Further studies are required to validate the use of COL1A1 as a biomarker for advanced NAFLD in a larger cohort.

      Pubmed     Free full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…