Ann Pediatr Res | Volume 4, Issue 4 | Research Article | Open Access
James A Lee1*, Candace S Percival1, Shaprina R Williams1, Justin G Peacock2, Christian L Carlson2 and Blaine A Tuft1
1Department of Pediatrics, Brooke Army Medical Center, USA 2Department of Radiology; Brooke Army Medical Center, USA
*Correspondance to: James A Lee
Fulltext PDFWe aim to highlight early findings from our epidemiologic trial investigating the association of Body Mass Index (BMI) and Alanine Amino Transferase (ALT) with liver steatosis and fibrosis using a post-processing MRI technique in a pediatric population. From the baseline data our findings were as expected, elevated BMI was associated with higher ALT values. Interestingly BMI percentage as a percent of the 95th percentile did not correlate as well as absolute BMI. This may suggest there are other mechanisms involved in the initiation of hepatocellular injury leading to higher ALT levels aside from the severity of obesity or suggest there is a threshold BMI that is permissive in the development of NAFLD. MRI was able to detect a significantly larger number of patients with potential liver disease than BMI or ALT alone. Moving forward, we hope to expand our data to include other biomarkers and investigate their associations with imaging end points. Further studies should be dedicated to investigating the correlation between histopathology and MRI scores to determine values for diagnostic purposes and the associations between those scores and liver-associated morbidity in pediatric patients.
Body mass index; Liver magnetic resonance imaging; Pediatric patients; Liver biopsy
Lee JA, Percival CS, Williams SR, Peacock JG, Carlson CL, Tuft BA. A Comparison between Body Mass Index, Alanine Amino Transferase and Quantitative Liver Magnetic Resonance Imaging for NAFLD in a Pediatric Population. Ann Pediatr Res. 2020; 4(4):1045..