Annalisa Berzigotti, Associate Professor of Medicine (Hepatology), MD, PhD
Hepatology, University Clinic for Visceral Surgery and Medicine
Inselspital, University of Berne, Switzerland
Annalisa Berzigotti graduated in Medicine, specialised in Internal Medicine and completed a doctorate in Ultrasound in Medicine at the University of Bologna, Italy. She focused on liver disease early in her career, and earned further clinical and research experience in hepatology at the Hepatic Hemodynamic Laboratory of the Liver Unit where she worked as a clinical researcher in 2008-2014.
Since December 2014 she is the staff hepatologist at the University Clinic of Visceral Surgery and Medicine (UVCM) of the Inselspital, University of Berne, Switzerland. In 2016, Annalisa Berzigotti was appointed Associate Professor of Hepatology at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Berne. Her main research interest focuses on clinical and diagnostic aspects of chronic liver disease; in this field she extensively worked on the invasive and non-invasive assessment of cirrhosis and portal hypertension. She was a member of the Scientific Committee of the Baveno VI consensus conference on the management of portal hypertension, and developed the EFSUMB recommendations on reporting of ultrasound in portal hypertension.
Annalisa is Associate Editor of Digestive and Liver Disease and of Seminars in Liver Disease. She is author/co-author of over 100 peer-reviewed original and review articles and of 15 book chapters on portal hypertension-related aspects.
In the last years her major research contributions included
- The identification of obesity as an independent risk factor for decompensation in cirrhosis;
- The description of an intensive lifestyle intervention as a safe and effective non-pharmacological tool to improve portal hypertension in obese patients with cirrhosis;
- The optimisation of ultrasound and elastography methods to diagnose portal hypertension; and
- The use of computer-assisted analyses of ultrasound and contrast-enhanced ultrasound images in the characterisation of cirrhosis and portal hypertension.