Are Fibroscans.... accurate?

[Liversliver]

Just curious if anyone has had theres jump around.

[moonbeam4]

Yes, it is quite possible for results tobe inaccurate, for example if a patient is overweight. My liver nurse also explained to me that if someone forgets to fast for 2 hours before the exam this will give a false reading as the liver swells after eating. This came as a suprise to me as i hadn,t been told not to eat or drink before my fibroscan! . Apparently one of her patients had to have a second test having eaten chips enroute to the hospital and her results the following day were 15 points lower!. There has also been an issue with the wrong sized probe ( i think they are large, medium, and small but don,t quote me on that ) being used, again the patients weight effecting which size should have been used. 😤

[moonbeam4]

Aha! just reread where your question talks of "jumping around" and think you may be referring to the numbers varying during the test. That is normal as the fibroscan works like a ship bouncing echos off of the ocean floor to map it out and so four or five " soundings" are taken and then averaged out to give. a final KPA score. For example my readings vary wildly from 10 to the high 20,s as the probe measures the different areas of stiffness due to cirhosis which they tell me helpfully is " sort of round the edges" lol 😂 x x x

[Roy1955]

I am overweight and my fibroscan results do confuse me.

Initially it was 24 (private scan in Harley street) then 6 months later NHS one was 10.5, if only that one was correct! but because of the differance they did it again 5 mins later and it was 16.

A year later I paid for another and that time the Dr used 2 differant machines one said 22 the other on a more modern machine (ultrasound guided) said 17.

It's not perfect and it's just one tool of many that's used to get to a diagnosis.