Scientists from Karolinska Institutet found that people with fatty liver disease are expected to live almost three years shorter than the general population.
The research is published in the journal Hepatology and was conducted by Ying Shang et al.
Eating excess calories causes fat to build up in the liver. When the liver does not process and break down fats as it normally should, too much fat will accumulate.
People tend to develop fatty liver if they have certain other conditions, such as obesity, diabetes or high triglycerides.
In the study, the team identified patients with fatty liver in Sweden to compare these with the general population.
They found patients with fatty liver are at the highest risk for developing serious complications such as cardiovascular disease, death, cirrhosis and cancer.
These people have a loss in life expectancy, compared to the general population.
They have approximately a 2.8 years shorter expected survival, based on collected data from a large number of Swedish patients.
However, the risk of death after a heart attack or stroke is still comparable to people without fatty liver.
The team says it will be easier to communicate around the expected survival of the patient and around the importance of the best possible treatment, which hopefully also can improve the patient’s prognosis.
In addition, the results indicate that you won’t need to examine the liver to see if patients with a heart attack or stroke are affected by fatty liver.
If you care about fatty liver disease, please read studies about a big cause of leaky gut, fatty liver disease, and common soap additive can make fatty liver disease worse.
For more information about liver health, please see recent studies about 8 things you need to know about liver disease hepatitis C, and results showing this common diabetes drug could help reverse liver inflammation.
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