Measuring iron in the liver: How a simple yet critical metric can turn the tide for the diagnosis and management of iron overload

It gives me great pleasure to welcome you to our new Physician Education Hub, where we look forward to sharing important updates from the fields of hepatology, radiology, oncology, and the role of noninvasive diagnostics. As a brief introduction, I am Dr. Carlos Duncker, M.D., Ph.D., Perspectum’s Director of Medical Affairs. I have over 25 years of experience in both private and public setting medical diagnostics as well as in research, having been top recruiter for clinical trials in fatty liver disease. Improving patient care through medical research has been one of my life-long passions (170 publications and counting!) and working at Perspectum allows me to share this passion more broadly, by helping to educate the community on applications of noninvasive testing in patient management.

The first article I’d like to highlight is from a close collaborator, Dr. Robert Gish, Professor of Medicine & Attending Physician at Loma Linda University School of Medicine (among many other affiliations), which provides an overview of the importance of accurate measurement of liver iron in clinical practice. Dr. Gish is a renowned internal medicine and hepatology expert with more than 30 years of clinical and educational expertise. In this brief article, Dr. Gish guides us through why iron overload is important, what damage it can cause, how it is commonly measured in the liver, and how MRI can accurately and more importantly, noninvasively measure liver iron.