This discussion on ways to improve MASH patient management comes from the early July roundtable on “Major Issues of the First Six Months of 2025.”
Louise drives this conversation based on two related issues she sees emerging: (i) increasing opportunities for motivated patients to manage their own health and (ii) managing the total patient in an environment where people may be taking incretin agonists as if they are consumer drugs. With increased access to scanning, providers can monitor patients (and patients can self-monitor) more closely. However, some of the issues a provider might find are tricky: patients who undertake what Louise describes as “the sneaky areas patients think are normal, but are probably contributing to disease” due to miseducation or no education on healthy eating and lifestyle, or patients purchasing and using incretin agonists through consumer channels, but possibly at subtherapeutic doses. Vigilance and probing are key here, but health systems will need to train more people on the types of probing that uncover underlying issues and behaviors that patients mistakenly believe to be healthy.
The discussion also bleeds into the role of NITs in diagnosis and patient management, and how providers need to shift the paradigm away from describing a patient by fibrosis stage and instead, focusing on the amount of fat in the liver and its overall suppleness.