Elsevier

Journal of Hepatology

Volume 55, Issue 3, September 2011, Pages 683-691
Journal of Hepatology

Review
Causality assessment methods in drug induced liver injury: Strengths and weaknesses

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhep.2011.02.007Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Summary

Diagnosis of drug-induced liver injury (DILI) remains a challenge and eagerly awaits the development of reliable hepatotoxicity biomarkers. Several methods have been developed in order to facilitate hepatotoxicity causality assessments. These methods can be divided into three categories: (1) expert judgement, (2) probabilistic approaches, and (3) algorithms or scales. The last category is further divided into general and liver-specific scales.

The Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences (CIOMS) scale, also referred to as the Roussel Uclaf Causality Assessment Method (RUCAM), although cumbersome and difficult to apply by physicians not acquainted with DILI, is used by many expert hepatologists, researchers, and regulatory authorities to assess the probability of suspected causal agents. However, several limitations of this scale have been brought to light, indicating that a number of adjustments are needed. This review is a detailed timely criticism to alert the readers of the limitations and give insight into what would be needed to improve the scale. Instructions on how to approach DILI diagnosis in practice are provided, using CIOMS as an aid to emphasize the topics to be addressed when assessing DILI cases.

Amendments of the CIOMS scale in the form of applying authoritative evidence-based criteria, a simplified scoring system and appropriate weighting given to individual parameters based on statistical evaluations with large databases will provide wider applicability in the clinical setting.

Abbreviations

ADR
adverse drug reaction
ALT
alanine aminotransferase
ALP
alkaline phosphatase
DILI
drug induced idiosyncratic liver injury
CIOMS
council for international organizations of medical science
RUCAM
Roussel Uclaf Causality Assessment Method

Keywords

Drug induced liver injury
Hepatotoxicity
CIOMS/RUCAM scale
Causality assessment methods
Diagnosis
Risk factors
Limitations

Cited by (0)

a

Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red: Enfermedades Hepáticas y Digestivas (CIBERehd).

b

On behalf of the Spanish Group for the Study of Drug-Induced Liver Disease (Grupo de Estudio para las Hepatopatías Asociadas a Medicamentos GEHAM)