Predictive Health Intelligence has announced a promising new way to identify people with serious liver disease earlier, using existing NHS blood test data.
The findings come from the LiveWell study, with results being presented at a major European liver congress last month.
The study looked at a new approach called the Cumulative Liver Damage Index (CLDI) delivered using a part-NHS-owned technology called hepatosight.
Unlike standard liver tests, which only show what is happening at one moment in time, CLDI looks at how liver damage has built up over many years. This could help doctors identify people at risk much earlier, before they become seriously unwell.
Liver disease is one of the fastest-growing causes of death in the UK. Death rates have increased more than fourfold since the 1970s, even while many other major diseases have improved. There are many causes of liver disease and anyone can be affected, including those who never drink alcohol.
One of the biggest challenges is that liver disease is often silent for many years. Many people do not know they are ill until the disease has already become advanced.
Currently, there is no national screening programme for liver disease. Existing methods can be expensive, difficult to scale, and are often not accurate enough to identify the right patients early.
Researchers used existing NHS blood test results to find people who might be at higher risk of significant liver disease. Participants were then invited for further liver assessment.
The study recruited 994 participants from a single NHS site in less than a year.
The results showed that CLDI was much more effective at identifying people with clinically significant liver disease than commonly used first-line investigations.
Importantly, this approach could also simplify things for patients. Instead of multiple rounds of testing, patients identified as high risk could potentially be referred directly for a liver scan, reducing unnecessary appointments and helping NHS services focus resources where they are most needed. During the study, patients identified using CLDI were invited for a non-invasive liver scan, provided by Tawazun Health, and a genetic profile, provided by Sano Genetics.
Researchers believe this could represent an important step towards earlier, more targeted identification of liver disease at population scale.
Hepatosight is currently being expanded across more parts of South West of England, with further NHS rollout planned in 2027.
A larger follow-up study involving 8,000 patients across multiple sites is already underway, with results expected later this summer.
