Original articlePancreas, biliary tract, and liverRapid Response to Treatment of Autoimmune Hepatitis Associated With Remission at 6 and 12 Months
Section snippets
Study Design
We performed a retrospective cohort study, establishing 2 independent cohorts of patients with AIH from 12 centers across 7 countries in Europe. We included patients with a probable or definite AIH diagnosis according to the simplified International Autoimmune Hepatitis Group score.7, 8, 9 When patients scored as “no AIH” by the simplified criteria, but were treated by their physicians as patients with AIH, the revised score was used to calculate a score per patient. Only patients with a
Population
Both the discovery and validation cohort consisted of 370 patients. Most patients were female (74.5%). Patients in the validation cohort were slightly older at time of diagnosis compared with patients in the discovery cohort (49.58 years vs 47.09 years; P = .04). Other baseline and treatment characteristics were comparable between the cohorts (Supplementary Table 1).
Receiver Operating Characteristic Analysis
Percentage decrease of AST after 8 weeks of treatment was significantly associated with normalization of transaminases at 26 weeks
Discussion
We show that patients with AIH with a substantial decrease (≥80%) of transaminases in the first 8 weeks of treatment have a high chance of normalization of transaminases and biochemical remission after 26 and 52 weeks of treatment. A rapid treatment response was independently associated with a lower risk of liver-related death or liver transplantation, although only in the discovery cohort. The clinical consequence of these observations is that ≥80% decrease in transaminase levels within 8
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Conflicts of interest The authors disclose no conflicts.
Funding Maria Papp was supported by the Janos Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (BO/00232/17/5) and the New National Excellence Program of the Ministry of Human Capacities (ÚNKP-19-4 Bolyai Plus).
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