Emerging Techniques for Assessment of Chronic Liver Diseases: The “Omics” Cascade

Chronic liver diseases are carrying an important social and economic burden, as they are having a high prevalence and are accompanied by many comorbidities. Furthermore, their progression ends frequently in a cirrhotic stage with its complications, the most fearful of these being the hepatocellular carcinoma. Therefore, diagnosing the disease at an early stage, then classifying the severity of the disease properly is mandatory. In addition, identifying the forms of liver diseases that are prone to progression towards severe fibrosis and cirrhosis is also very important. The invasive methods of diagnosis are almost completely replaced by noninvasive techniques, some of them failing to prove a high diagnostic accuracy, others being very expensive or not applicable or reliable. Consequently, the researchers are diving lately into a new domain of noninvasive diagnosis, namely OMICS cascade, which is very complex and through its multiple faces, addresses the different pathogenetic pathways of liver disease, increasing the probability of diagnosis, staging and prognosis to a higher level. The aim of this review is to present the data we have gathered until now from the field of genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics and metabolomics in the assessment of liver diseases.

Keywords: Genomics, Liver diseases, Metabolomics, Proteomics, Transcriptomics.