“These are diseases that are growing increasingly common and that have a poor prognosis if detected late,” says Rickard Strandberg, affiliated researcher at Karolinska Institutet’s Department of Medicine in Huddinge, who has developed the test with his departmental colleague Hannes Hagström. “Our method can predict the risk of severe liver disease within 10 years and is based on three simple routine blood tests.”

For the study, the researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and their colleagues in Finland evaluated how well the method can estimate the risk of severe liver disease. The model, which is called CORE, was produced with advanced statistical methods and is based on five factors: age, sex and levels of three common liver enzymes (AST, ALT and GGT), which are commonly measured during regular health checks.