This post was provided by SomaLogic team member Emilia costales. Thanks Emilia!

Corporate Communicator at SomaLogic
Next month marks the anniversary of an event we don’t celebrate in my family. Three years ago, my 36-year-old niece, Sonya, passed away suddenly after complaining of a headache. She was later found unconscious at home and could not be revived. She left behind two young children who still struggle to understand what happened to their mother. The medical examiner’s report cleared up some of the mystery: What killed her was abnormal heart rhythm from undiagnosed nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, or fatty liver disease
According to the American Liver Foundation, about 100 million individuals in the US have nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, or NAFLD. The disease is not just for adults. It’s the most common form of liver disease in children and has more than doubled in children over the past 20 years. The most severe form of fatty liver disease is called nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, or NASH, which damages the liver permanently. The National Institutes of Health state that, even though NASH can be fatal, the disease can cause no symptoms, just like in my niece’s case.
NASH causes liver inflammation and progresses silently, leading to cirrhosis, liver cancer and liver failure. Tests for the disease may include blood tests and imaging but, ultimately, the gold standard for identifying the disease is a liver biopsy where a needle is inserted between a patient’s ribs and into the liver to collect a sample of tissue. Higher risk patients may need a transjugular liver biopsy where the needle is threaded into the jugular vein in the neck and travels down to the liver to collect a sample.
In May 2020, SomaLogic announced the availability of the NASH Bundle as a SomaSignal™ test for research use only by pharma and academic customers. As part of the SomaSignal “Barracuda” launch, the bundle includes four tests for NASH: steatosis, inflammation, ballooning and fibrosis. These tests can be done on patients with a single small sample of blood—no biopsy required.