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Of: TT
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Photo: Bertil Ericson / TT
Most people with fatty liver don’t even know they have the disease. Stock Photography.
Thousands of Swedes suffer from fatty liver caused by obesity or being overweight. But even with mild fatty liver disease, mortality increases, research shows.
Fatty liver is a disease that, as it sounds, is due to the liver accumulating fat. Most often due to obesity or being overweight, not infrequently in combination with alcohol consumption.
Previous research has shown that people with fatty liver who have developed severe fibrosis (tissue changes) or cirrhosis (cirrhosis) are at increased risk of dying prematurely.
But what about everyone else, those who “only” have mild fatty liver disease? The question is relevant, especially since almost half of Sweden’s adult population is overweight or obese.
Doubled mortality
Now, researchers from the Karolinska Institutet and Massachusetts General Hospital can show that even mild fatty liver disease increases risk and that mortality increases with increasing severity of the disease.
The researchers, led by pediatrician Jonas F. Ludvigsson, started from Swedish registries and matched 10,568 people with diagnosed fatty liver disease to monitor people from the general population.
The results, which are published in the journal Gut, show that all stages, even the early ones, were associated with higher mortality. The excess mortality the researchers observed was mainly due to cancer outside the liver, while cardiovascular and liver disease were not as significant. The overall increase in risk was up to 93 percent, although the increase varied greatly depending on the severity of the disease. The more severe the disease, the higher the death rate.
Swedish records
“This is the first nationwide cohort study with detailed liver tissue data confirming that fatty liver is associated with an increased risk of premature death,” said lead study author Tracey Simon, a researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital. , in a press release.
The current study is based on the so-called Espresso cohort, where data from tissue samples from more than two million Swedes are linked to various health registries, such as the patient registry and the cause of death registry.
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