New Drug Brings Hope For Liver Disease Patients

Liver disease remains a health issue that's often not discovered until the health issue has become more severe.

Recent findings published in The Lancet show that an experimental drug used for treating common liver disease has shown promising results for many suffering from the health issue.

Findings showed that people with nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) who took the drug obeticholic showed improved liver health during the study period. Improvements included a decrease and in inflammation and fat in the liver, which helped many participants lose weight, in turn.

"NASH is a common and potentially serious disease that currently has no approved treatment. Management typically includes weight loss through diet and exercise," said Averell Sherker, M.D., NIDDK program official for the NASH Clinical Research Network (NASH CRN), which performed the FLINT study, in a news release. 

Study findings revealed that liver health improved in about 45 percent of people on OCA versus 21 percent of the placebo group. 

"Although obeticholic acid did not eliminate liver disease in FLINT participants, it demonstrated a promising effect. Larger studies will be required to determine the drug's safety and efficacy," Sherker concluded. "The FLINT trial represents an important advance in the search for treatments of NASH. The causes of NASH are not fully understood, and causes and treatments may be different among patients," added the study's lead author, Brent Neuschwander-Tetri, M.D., a professor at St. Louis University. "We need to study the changes in cholesterol levels more to know if the increases caused by obeticholic acid increase the risk of hardening of the arteries. We found that the improvement in liver enzymes with obeticholic acid were not sustained after treatment was stopped, so we would expect that treatment would need to be indefinite, much like the medications for diabetes and hypertension."