As more awareness is being raised about autoimmune hepatitis more can be done to help the patients with the condition. While it may be a slow moving process doctors are encouraged that their patients are receiving the help they need.
And one thing with autumn titus because of the nature of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is an epidemic and if you get the ottoman markers in patients that have non-alcoholic steatohepatitis or gnash about 20% of them will have positive autoimmune markers one of the only ways you can actually discern this is with liver biopsy and then also other contributing
Factors does the patient have an autoimmune disease is a patient overweight with the elevated bmi or metabolic syndrome so these are only subtle things the problem is people can also have autoimmune hepatitis and fatty liver so again it only intensifies the importance of probably getting to see a hepatologist that has expertise in delineating these entities so as
Of right now to my knowledge nobody else is doing this approach we’ve seen a push in the clinical trials front that maybe advertising for clinical trials through social media maybe an approach however someone that’s looking for patent disease pathogenesis questions not necessarily being done this way and there they’re kind of depending on their institution but also
Collaborations with the surrounding institutions but again how big is that even when you compare it to the continental united states and canada we want to grow and we want to engage as many people because really the the theoretic aims of not only the research network but our national society the a iha is patient support fellowship interaction and knowledge and so
Ultimately the bigger we can get the more we actually can start to study with a greater degree of satisfaction knowing that the results we find are significantly though we need funding and so essentially by doing outreach this way we hope to kind of garner this this organization for growth to continue to provide education but also in theory with we’d like to be able
To support our own research through it as well much like other rare diseases that have these type of communities or support groups they extractive able to develop grants for people outside the group to apply for and therefore award people with opportunities to further the disease knowledge so that’s really where we’d like to go this disease has been stagnant since
Really the early 90s and again another reason that we are fulfilling this unmet need in terms of research ultimately the the research has been limited by expertise patient numbers and funding and again three big things that at least with our platform i think we can get get around so research for autoimmune hepatitis is paramount we must understand this condition
Better than the way we need to do it is by patient number with the ottoman hepatitis research network on facebook we are able to recruit patients to be involved in eih research this includes to count the completion of epidemiology surveys but also the acquisition of dna through saliva samples with this we can actually start to understand pathogenesis so what causes
This disease but also maybe identify pathways that are important disease that we can actually target for treatment by finding this on the research network through facebook we actually have our coordinators and name available you can do it through direct email and/or his correct contact number once that’s initiated our coordinator will contact that individual we’ll go
Through the inclusion exclusion criteria and if a patient satisfies those we will then directly make a mail the informed consent along with the epi questionnaires but also the saliva kits so this is patient initiated however with physicians knowing about this and then again referring their own patients to say hey there is a great resource on facebook it’s another way to grill our number
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Autoimmune Hepatitis Treatment Finally Moving Forward By HCPLive