Activin A levels in metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease associates with fibrosis and the PNPLA3 I148M variant

Figures & data

Figure 1. Circulating plasma levels of activin A in patients according to the (a) fibrosis stage (F0-2, n = 30; F3-4, n = 11), (b) steatosis grade (0, n = 1; 1, n = 12; 2, n = 10; 3, n = 16), (c) ballooning grade (0, n = 33; 1, n = 6) and (d) lobular inflammation grade (0, n = 36; 1, n = 3). (e) Circulating plasma levels of activin A in patients with PNPLA3 wild type (w.t) or heterozygote C/G allele (n = 33) compared to patients with the homozygote G/G allele (n = 5). * for p < 0.05, *** for p < 0.001. Data are presented as individual values and medians. (f) Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve demonstrating the performance of FIB-4 and Activin A in detecting the presence of advanced fibrosis. Activin A AUROC = 0.836 and FIB-4 AUROC = 0.839.

Table 1. Univariate and multivariate logistic regression analysis. Evaluation of predictors of advanced fibrosis in MASLD.

	Model 1			Model 2
Variable	OR*	95 % Cl	P value	aOR**	95 % Cl	P-value
Activin A	1.011	1.004–1.019	0.003	1.021	1.007–1.035	0.003
PNPLA3 (G/G)	0.781	0.076–8.041	0.836	0.120	0.002–8.153	0.324
Gender (male)	0.812	0.168–3.915	0.795	4.903	0.246–97.687	0.298
Age (years)	1.046	0.973–1.125	0.220	0.912	0.801–1.039	0.166
BMI (kg/m^2)	0.982	0.841–1.146	0.813	1.214	0. 828–1.781	0. 321
T2DM (yes)	1.778	0.391–8.085	0.457	2.384	0.186–30.568	0.504

*Model 1 is crude/unadjusted.

**Model 2 is adjusted for all variables included in the crude analysis.

Abbreviations: PNPLA3, patatin-like phospholipase domain-containing protein 3; BMI, body mass index; OR, odds ratio; T2DM, type 2 diabetes mellitus.