It’s a advocacy for “sustainable medicine in hepatology” recently defended by Professor Fabien Zoulim, one of the great French hepatologists. In his text, the professor recalls that “chronic liver diseases constitute a major health threat in the world, including in Europe”. “They affect more than 1.5 billion people worldwide: chronic hepatitis virus infections remain a scourge with 58 million people infected with the hepatitis C virus (HCV) and 300 million with the hepatitis B (HBV)”, explains the doctor. Additionally, “10% of the population is at risk of alcohol-related liver disease due to excessive alcohol consumption; due to the continuous increase in obesity and metabolic syndrome, 25% of the population has non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (…) Chronic liver disease is responsible for more than two million deaths per year due to complications of cirrhosis of the liver and hepatocellular carcinoma”. Liver cancer ranks 6th in the world for cancer prevalence and 4th for cancer mortality. In his text, Fabien Zoulim mentions an improvement in care, even if “access to transplantation and improving the availability of grafts remain difficult”. It also notes the impact of these diseases on public health and the economy and underlines that several phenomena (excessive alcohol consumption, epidemic of obesity, concurrency, undiagnosed or untreated liver diseases in certain groups exposed to precariousness, etc.) contribute to hepatology being “facing an imminent epidemic, in which socio-economic and health inequalities combine to negatively affect the prevalence of liver diseases, the results of treatments and the possibilities of receive treatment”. For the doctor: “The promotion of effective curative strategies, an optimization of clinical care pathways and management, from innovative diagnostic procedures to new therapies, will have to meet several challenges in public health, ethics, human and social sciences. and health economics”. And to conclude: “To meet the future challenges of the comprehensive management of these diseases in the context of a rapidly expanding and evolving field, it will be essential to integrate basic, translational and cutting-edge clinical research to evaluate new new therapies and set new standards of care for patients with chronic liver disease”.
