Weekend Drinking and Liver Scarring; COVID and C. Diff; Stopping Hep B Therapy

Occasional heavy drinking may triple the odds of advanced liver fibrosis in people with metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease. (Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology)

Daytime liver transplants can be safely performed after prolonged dual hypothermic oxygenated machine perfusion of donor livers, prospective data from the Netherlands showed. (JAMA Network Open)

Therapeutic plasma exchange in acute-on-chronic liver failure reduced mortality at 28 days, but not at 90 days, a randomized trial from India found. (Hepatology)

The Baveno criteria can help avoid unnecessary endoscopies for ruling out portal hypertension in patients with compensated cirrhosis, research in Gastro Hep Advances suggested.

A predictive model based on clinical factors can help identify Crohn’s disease patients at higher risk of postoperative recurrence who may benefit from biologic prophylaxis. (Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology)

Potassium-competitive acid blockers may not carry a higher Clostridioides difficile infection risk compared with proton pump inhibitors or histamine 2 receptor antagonists, a retrospective study suggested. (American Journal of Gastroenterology)

COVID and C. difficile coinfection represent a bad mix, according to National Inpatient Sample mortality data from early in the pandemic. (Gastro Hep Advances)

Peroral endoscopic myotomy continued to prove more effective than pneumatic dilation for achalasia after a failed laparoscopic Heller myotomy in 5-year follow-up of a randomized trial. (Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology)

A majority (59%) of virally suppressed chronic hepatitis B patients who stopped nucleos(t)ide analogue treatment eventually required retreatment, while 17% achieved off-treatment loss of hepatitis B surface antigen, 10-year follow-up from the RETRACT-B cohort showed. (Journal of Hepatology)

Next-generation sequencing can aid in the diagnostic evaluation of bile duct strictures while identifying actionable mutations in neoplasms, according to a prospective study. (Gastroenterology)

Patient navigation and mailed fecal immunochemical test (FIT) outreach appeared to be the most effective for boosting colorectal cancer (CRC) screening uptake among eight interventions examined in a meta-analysis of 76 randomized trials. (Gastroenterology)

Patients with advanced or multiple adenomas on their initial colonoscopy for CRC screening but who then had a normal first surveillance exam were at increased risk of advanced findings on their second surveillance colonoscopy, registry data from New Hampshire found. (Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology)