Prognostic Value of Inflammatory Indicators in Chronic Hepatitis B Patients With Significant Liver Fibrosis: A Multicenter Study in China

Diagnosis of significant liver fibrosis is essential to facilitate the optimal treatment decisions and improve prognosis in patients with chronic hepatitis B (CHB). We aimed to evaluate the value of inflammatory indicators and construct a nomogram that effectively predicts significant liver fibrosis among CHB patients. 563 CHB patients from two centers in China from 2014 to 2019 were divided into three cohorts (development, internal validation, and independent validation cohorts), assigned into cases with significant fibrosis (liver fibrosis stages ≥2) and those without. Multiple biochemical and serological inflammatory indicators were investigated. Inflammatory indicators, Alanine aminotransferase (ALT) and aspartate aminotransferase (AST), were significantly associated with significant liver fibrosis in CHB patients but limited predictive performance, and then we combined them with prothrombin time activity percentage (PTA) and liver stiffness measurement (LSM) were identified by multivariate logistic regression analysis. Based on these factors, we constructed the nomogram with excellent performance. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) for the nomogram in the development, internal validation, and independent validation cohorts were 0.860, 0.877, and 0.811, respectively. Our nomogram based on ALT and AST that had excellent performance in predicting significant fibrosis of CHB patients were constructed.