United States: A new study shows that more adults in the United States – 42 percent – have fatty liver disease than previously thought. The research, led by a doctor from Virginia Commonwealth University, found that the disease is more common among Hispanic people compared to other groups.
The study, published on October 29 in Nature Communications Medicine, also looks at how different types of liver disease, like those caused by metabolism problems or alcohol, affect different groups of people.
As reported by the vcuhealth.org,
“This study focuses on a prominent health concern in the United States, and it demonstrates that specific populations are more vulnerable,” said Juan Pablo Arab, the corresponding author, an M.D. who is a a hepatologist with VCU’s Stravitz-Sanyal Institute for Liver Disease and Metabolic Health, and the director of alcohol sciences.
“We would like these observations to inform subsequent targeted efforts to lessen the toll of liver disease in high-risk populations.”
Non-alcoholic steatohepatitis on the other hand is a more specific steatotic liver disease in which fat accumulation which causes inflammation of the liver cells. This last condition – the combination of both metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease and alcohol-associated liver diseases moving together under a new umbrella term known as MetALD was incorporated in 2023.
This new classification has assisted the doctors and research to come up with clearer understanding on how MASLD, ALD and MetALD occurs and the groups most affected.
In the new study, the authors were more interested in understanding how such change in classification might influence prevalence rates in the different subgroups. The team wanted to know how common these liver diseases are under the new characterization, so they used data of 5,532 US adults from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey of 2017-18.
They also found that the prevalence of MASLD is rather high, it was diagnosed in 4/10 of the adults. Essentially, MetALD and ALD impact a lesser number of – 1.7% and 0.6% of adult correspondingly.
Hispanic adults had higher MASLD proportion (47% than 40%) of other R/E groups, and a three times rise comparing to the 2014 survey for over 6,800 people in which 29% were Hispanics.