How healthy are the “Healthy volunteers”? Penetrance of NAFLD in the biomedical research volunteer pool

• Published in: Hepatology (Baltimore, Md.) Vol. 66; no. 3; pp. 825 - 833
• Main Authors: Takyar, Varun, Nath, Anand, Beri, Andrea, Gharib, Ahmed M., Rotman, Yaron
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc 01.09.2017
• Subjects: Adult; Aged; Aged, 80 and over; Alanine; Alanine transaminase; Biomedical Research; Body mass; Body Mass Index; Case-Control Studies; Cholesterol; Clinical trials; Clinical Trials as Topic; Cross-Sectional Studies; Fatty liver; Healthy Volunteers - classification; Hepatology; Humans; Liver diseases; Liver Function Tests; Low density lipoprotein; Male; Middle Aged; Non-alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease - pathology; Predictive Value of Tests; Reference Values; Reproducibility of Results; Retrospective Studies; Triglycerides; Validity; Young Adult

Healthy volunteers are crucial for biomedical research. Inadvertent inclusion of subjects with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) as controls can compromise study validity and subject safety. Given the rising prevalence of NAFLD in the general population, we sought to identify its prevalence a...