High Concordance Between Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease and Metabolic Dysfunction-Associated Steatotic Liver Disease in the TARGET-NASH Real-World Cohort

The 2023 global nomenclature shift from NAFLD/NASH to MASLD/MASH created immediate uncertainty for sponsors and investigators about whether patients enrolled under prior criteria could be re-classified, potentially invalidating years of longitudinal follow-up data.

The TARGET-NASH cohort was interrogated to assess the degree of overlap between NAFLD and MASLD case definitions across a large, multi-site US population, providing the first real-world concordance estimate at population scale.

Demonstrating very high concordance between NAFLD and MASLD classifications validates the continued use of the TARGET-NASH longitudinal dataset under the new nomenclature, directly protecting the investment in existing RWE infrastructure and supporting uninterrupted evidence generation for drug development.

Nomenclature transition risk assessment for longitudinal RWE cohorts, Regulatory-grade evidence for MASLD/NAFLD dataset continuity, Cohort harmonization support for sponsors with pre-2023 trial or registry data