Here’s a disturbing statistic: more than 60% of patients with type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, obesity or abnormal lipid numbers may also have fatty liver disease, the non-alcoholic kind. The problem is that there are few treatments. Management centers focuses on the metabolic problems. A new paper from Oxana Mikhailovna Drapkina and Vladimir TrofimovichIvashkin at First Moscow State Medical University in Moscow give a thorough explanation and flesh out the current treatments.
Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is characterized by excessive fat accumulation in the liver or steatosis. As many as 30% have steatohepatitis which leads to liver-cell injury, inflammation, fibrosis and cirrhosis. Other dangers are liver cancer.
Management of NAFLD includes:
- Weight loss
- Insulin sensitizers
- Statins
- Renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system blockers
- Vitamin E
- Phospholipids
And synbiotics may eventually prove to be useful. The authors report that “Experimental studies on biological models demonstrated that intestinal bacterial endotoxins damaged liver to a less degree in the presence of pre-and probiotics.”
In one controlled study, reported in this review, 44 obese children with steatohepatitis, fatty liver severity assessed by ultrasound was improved with a mixture of eight probiotic strains. Read the 2014 full study by Alisi and colleagues here.
Effective strategies are needed as metabolic syndrome becomes pervasive globally. There simply won’t be enough healthy livers for needed transplants.