Abstract
BACKGROUND: Type 2 diabetes increases the risk of cirrhosis and liver cancer. Noninvasive and early assessment of liver fibrosis is essential. We aimed to develop a score to aid in the initial assessment of liver fibrosis in the diabetic population. METHODS: A fibrosis investigating navigator in diabetes (FIND) score was developed and validated in the NHANES dataset (2017-2020). Fibrosis was defined as a liver stiffness measurement (LSM) ≥8.0 kPa. The diagnostic accuracies of FIB-4, NFS, LiverRisk, steatosis-associated fibrosis estimator (SAFE) and metabolic dysfunction-associated fibrosis (MAF-5) were compared. FIND was also externally validated in various liver diseases via biopsy as a reference in an Asian centre between 2016 and 2020. Finally, we examined the prognostic implications of the FIND index utilizing data from the UK Biobank cohort (2006-2010). RESULTS: The FIND score model yielded an AUROC of 0.781 for the prediction of an LSM ≥8 kPa in the validation set, which was consistently greater than that of other available models (all p < 0.05). In the whole NHANES dataset, the 85% sensitivity cut-off of 0.16 corresponded to a NPV of 91.9%, whereas the 85% specificity cut-off of 0.31 corresponded to a PPV of 50.6%. FIND displayed overall accuracies similar to those of the other models in staging fibrosis stages, with biopsy used as a reference. In the UK Biobank cohort, FIND >0.31 was associated with an increased risk of all-cause and liver-related mortality in the diabetic population in adjusted models (HR, 1.75; 95% CI, 1.62-1.89; HR, 23.59; 95% CI, 13.67-40.69). CONCLUSIONS: In diabetes patients, the novel FIND score performs well in identifying subjects at risk of liver fibrosis and predicting all-cause and liver-related mortality.