Field: Medicine › HepatologyType: No effect foundArea: hepatocellular carcinomaTarget: Transjugular intrahepatic portosystemic shunt (TIPS)Stage: full study
Hypothesis
A TIPS shunt changes blood flow in the liver, so it would interfere with imaging and delay the diagnosis of liver cancer.
What failed
Among 279 patients, the 37 with a TIPS had more scans and a longer time from first scan to diagnosis, but their LI-RADS imaging criteria, tumour stage at diagnosis, transplant rate and survival did not differ.
Broken assumption
A TIPS shunt makes liver cancer harder to diagnose on contrast imaging.
Why
The shunt lengthened surveillance but did not make tumours harder to classify on imaging or leave them at a later stage.
From the published paper: Wong et al. PLoS ONE, 2018. ↗CC BY