This new method can contribute to improving the negative tendency of late diagnoses of cirrhosis, and it will improve the otherwise poor diagnoses related to cirrhosis. By diagnosing the condition earlier, doctors may be able to prevent the disease from progressing any further, before it is too late and thus enable them to help the patients and reduce the high mortality rate.
What is cirrhosis?
Cirrhosis is a very serious condition that often results in death. It is the final stage of a number of different liver diseases, herein fatty liver and hepatitis. Cirrhosis is a chronic condition, where the liver tissue is replaced due to scar tissue – the result of prolonged liver damage. Usually, cirrhosis is caused by an excessive alcohol intake over a longer period. Although cirrhosis is a life-threatening disease, the symptoms are often unspecific as the patients frequently only notice factors such as increased fatigue and reduced appetite, initiative and sexual desire. However, yellowing of the skin, dark urine and putty-coloured stools are serious signs of a damaged liver.
The cheese scanner as a useful tool for doctors
The normally late discovery of the disease makes it more difficult for the physician to improve the patient’s condition. Now, researchers from Odense University hospital have luckily found a way to change this negative statistic of the course of the disease in people with cirrhosis. For this reason, they plan to invest about £1.4m in liver research over the next 5 years. They point out that there is a need for better treatments and methods to diagnose the disease earlier.
Researcher Maja Thiele, from Odense University Hospital, has discovered that a cheese scanner from the food industry can detect cirrhosis in its earlier stages. The cheese scanner is usually used to measure the ripeness of the cheese by sending ultrasonic waves into the cheese to measure its firmness. The cheese scanner has now shown to possess another important function as well; it can detect cirrhosis far earlier during the disease, compared to when the disease presents itself with noticeable symptoms, or when doctors can detect changes in the liver enzymes in a blood sample. At the same time, the scan is painless, contrary to a tissue sample from the liver, which is necessary to determine the disease.
This could indicate that the cheese scanner should be moved from the cold-storage room out to the hospitals or out to the GP’s, where they can contribute to an early diagnosis of cirrhosis. Because of this, treatment can be initiated earlier, thus reducing the mortality rate by preventing the disease from worsening.
