S4-E44.3 - Roberta Forlano on Different Challenges for Different Patient Populations

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This week on SurfingNASH, we introduce the audience to new guest, Dr Roberta Forlano, who's been awarded an EASL Juan Rodes PhD Fellowship and has completed a PhD in Translational Hepatology at Imperial college London in 2022. Her current research interest are screening strategies for NAFLD in primary care, automated quantitation of histological features , lifestyle management, CV risk assessment and non-invasive markers in NAFLD. These interests and much more are shared and discussed with Jörn Schattenberg, Louise Campbell and Roger Green in a compelling episode with an overarching theme focusing on screening strategies for gender-based SLD challenges. To offer an example of how immensely productive and busy Roberta and her team have been, they recently presented 6 posters at the recently concluded SLD Summit.

This conversation starts with Roger asking Roberta to describe the demographics of the population in the northwest London region where the study of interest was done. Roberta comments on the robust diversity of the population, after which Louise amplifies this point by noting the large number of Arabic and South Asian patients in the study population. She discusses why culturally this might matter and the challenges that those populations might present. From there, we discuss the P-values associated with different diabetes drug therapies and their impact on MASH and simple diagnostic methods. Finally, ideas are shared around challenges which may present to patients which ultimately persuade them not to participate in a study. 

With that as a very brief introduction to a fascinating conversation well-worth a listen, surf on to learn more about Roberta and critical ideas around screening strategies and much more. If you have questions or comments stemming from this episode, or any others for that matter, we kindly ask that you submit reviews wherever you download the discourse. Alternatively, you can write to us directly at [email protected].

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