Applicability of BARD score to Japanese patients with NAFLD

We read the article by Harrison et al 1 with great interest. The authors proposed an easily calculated composite score for predicting the risk of advanced fibrosis in patients with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), called the BARD score: the weighted sum of the three variables (body mass index (BMI) ⩾28 = 1 point, aspartate aminotransferase/alanine aminotransferase ratio (AAR) ⩾0.8 = 2 points, diabetes = 1 point). When a BARD score of 2–4 was used, the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) was found to be 0.81 with an odds ratio (OR) of 17 (95% CI 9.2 to 31.9) for detecting advanced fibrosis. The positive predictive value (PPV) and negative predictive value (NPV) were 43% and 96%, respectively. We studied the reliability of the BARD score for identifying …