Beyond Transplant: Advancements in Primary Biliary Cholangitis Treatment

Announcer:
Welcome to GI Insights on ReachMD. On this episode, we’ll learn how second-line treatments have impacted the management of primary biliary cholangitis with Dr. Alan Bonder, who’s the Director of Liver Transplantation at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital and an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Here’s Dr. Bonder now.

Dr. Bonder: 
So if you look at the amount of transplants that we've done for PBC in the last 20 years, that number has significantly decreased. So the message is, we are doing a really good job of treating those patients and preventing those patients to progress to cirrhosis and advanced liver disease. But not only that, I think right now what we need to do next is, can we treat those patients who already got to cirrhosis and have advanced liver disease to prevent them from going to transplant? I mean, that's an unknown.

And finally, I think one big important issue is quality of life and the symptoms that we need to treat from PBC, although I think seladelpar and elafibranor have shown a good improvement in treating symptoms. For example, there are certain symptoms that we don't have a treatment for, like fatigue or abdominal pain in patients with PBC. So I think right now, the picture is looking great, but we have to do a better job of treating symptomatology in those patients.

Announcer: 
That was Dr. Alan Bonder talking about the impact of second-line treatments on the management of primary biliary cholangitis. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit GI Insights on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!