Hopefully you clicked on the picture to hear the very short quote from Shakespeare.  Sometimes I can't resist a bit of drama.

Since you have an interest in liver disease, I wanted to let you know that we have reached a real milestone in the development of the foundation.  We intend to help change the way liver disease, particularly NASH, is managed and to save the lives of millions who do not know today that they are at risk.

The sad statistics are easy to find.  Here are a couple of links if you would like a refresher.

IF YOU HAVE 2 FRIENDS ONE OF YOU HAS A FATTY LIVER

WHY WAS MY LIVER DISEASE MISSED?

LIVER SCREENING PROGRAM

All of that is just background.  The news is that our study has been officially accepted in the ClinicalTrials.gov database.

SUNN study -- Screening for Undiagnosed NAFLD and NASH

Remember our goal.  There are 20 million Americans with undiagnosed NASH liver disease. We want to screen one million people a year and warn them of their disease condition before they progress to having symptoms.  Wellness should be our strategy not the treatment of symptoms. The Sunn study is the pilot phase of our project to deploy 400 screening systems around the country to help people be well rather than struggling with illness.

There is a tide in the management of large societal problems.  Liver disease has been building in this country for decades. The doctors and some politicians know it, but there has never been a momentum for change that had a chance to develop.  That is changing.  The acceptance of our study as a serious research effort, aimed at the people who do not know they are in harms way, is at the crest of a wave which can reshape our approach to wellness. 

We are entering the time when the mission is not can we learn something new, it is changing to how do we figure out how to build capacity in our preventive care and wellness systems to prevent disease.  These subjects have had a lot of discussion but much of it has been mostly sound and fury with little real impact.  Taken at the flood, however, real progress is possible.  The tens of billions of dollars and millions of lives lost to problems that were preventable does not have to be our destiny.