A silent epidemic is becoming a leading driver of liver transplants.
“This is a silent process, much like high blood pressure or diabetes,” explains Manal Abdelmalek, a liver disease specialist at Duke University. But unlike high blood pressure or diabetes, which doctors can detect with cheap and easy tests during a routine check-up, NASH is difficult to diagnose. Most people with scarring on their liver don’t display symptoms, and right now there’s no straightforward biomarker that a routine blood panel would pick up. The only reliable measure of fibrosis is a liver biopsy.
Moreover, the disease progresses slowly—over years or even decades—and researchers have yet to figure out when someone with a fatty liver is at risk for developing the inflammation and fibrosis that define NASH.
That subtle, slow-moving process begins with the build-up of fat in the liver, a condition called nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, or NAFLD, because it is not driven by alcohol consumption. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, up to 20% of the American population has NAFLD, which occurs when fat makes up more than 5% of the liver.
http://cen.acs.org/articles/94/i39/...Member&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_campaign=CEN
“This is a silent process, much like high blood pressure or diabetes,” explains Manal Abdelmalek, a liver disease specialist at Duke University. But unlike high blood pressure or diabetes, which doctors can detect with cheap and easy tests during a routine check-up, NASH is difficult to diagnose. Most people with scarring on their liver don’t display symptoms, and right now there’s no straightforward biomarker that a routine blood panel would pick up. The only reliable measure of fibrosis is a liver biopsy.
Moreover, the disease progresses slowly—over years or even decades—and researchers have yet to figure out when someone with a fatty liver is at risk for developing the inflammation and fibrosis that define NASH.
That subtle, slow-moving process begins with the build-up of fat in the liver, a condition called nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, or NAFLD, because it is not driven by alcohol consumption. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, up to 20% of the American population has NAFLD, which occurs when fat makes up more than 5% of the liver.
http://cen.acs.org/articles/94/i39/...Member&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_campaign=CEN
