In a new study, researchers found that women with long or irregular periods are at risk of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD).
About 24% of U.S. adults have NAFLD, a chronic disease in which excess fat builds up in your liver.
This buildup of fat is not caused by heavy alcohol use.
NAFLD can progress to chronic liver damage and is associated with a higher risk of death.
Diet and exercise are the standard of care for NAFLD as no medicines have been approved to treat the disease.
Previous studies have shown that women with long or irregular periods have a higher risk of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
In the current study, the team examined a data set of 72,092 women under 40 years old.
About 28% of these women had long or irregular menstrual cycles, and 7% had NAFLD.
The researchers followed up four years later and found new cases of NAFLD occurred in almost 9% of the women.
The findings suggest that there was an association between long or irregular menstrual cycles in young, premenopausal women and an increased risk of NAFLD.
Since diet and exercise are the standard of care for NAFLD and no medicine is available, it’s important for young women with long or irregular menstrual cycles to make necessary lifestyle changes to reduce the risk of NAFLD as well as other cardiometabolic diseases.
If you care about liver health, please read studies about a simple habit that could give you a healthy liver, and common diabetes drugs that may reverse liver inflammation.
For more information about health, please see recent studies about simple blood test that could detect your risk of fatty liver disease, and results showing this green diet may strongly lower non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
The study was conducted by Seungho Ryu et al., and published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.
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