NASH Observatory

NAFLD and hepatocellular carcinoma are strongly associated with obesity, insulin resistance and the metabolic syndrome and directly attributed to changes in lifestyle, especially dietary patterns and sedentary behaviour. Western diet and cholesterol contained in the diet exacerbate hepatic accumulation of free cholesterol, resulting in the toxic effects on the liver...

Liver stiffness, as assessed by vibration-controlled transient elastography (VCTE), correlates with hepatic fibrosis, an important predictor of liver-related and all-cause mortality. Although liver fat is associated with cardiovascular risk factors, the association between hepatic fibrosis and cardiovascular risk factors is less clear...

The purpose of this study by H. Fennoun et al. (University Hospital, Casablanca, Morocco) was to determine the interest of hepatic steatosis index in the detection of hepatic steatosis in patients with type 2 diabetes in order to establish an appropriate screening program of this disease in the population of diabetics hospitalized in Morocco...

Artificial intelligence uses computational methods that enable machines to learn from patterns and relationships in data in order to make predictions. Natural language processing can be used to extract knowledge from text, data can be modelled for the prediction of outcomes, and machine vision can analyse and recognise images...

Human mesenchymal stromal cells are adult stem cells, which feature hepatotropism. They support liver regeneration through amelioration of hepatic inflammation and lipid accumulation in a mouse model of NASH. To study mesenchymal stromal cells actions on fatty liver mechanistically, MJ Hsu et al...

Physical activity and NAFLD have an inverse association. However, studies assessing the impact of the widely accepted Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans on NAFLD are lacking. D. Kim et al. (Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, USA) performed a serial, cross-sectional analysis among ...

Morbidity related to NAFLD and resulting NASH is likely to increase dramatically in the coming decades, especially in the Gulf countries, where there is already an epidemic of obesity and diabetes melittus. In their article, K. Alswat et al. (Liver Disease Research Center, College of Medicine, King Saud University, Riyad) estimated...

Manual histologic assessment is currently the accepted standard for diagnosing and monitoring disease progression in nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), but is limited by variability in interpretation and insensitivity to change. A. Taylor-Weiner et al. (PathAI, Boston, Massachusetts, USA) describe here a machine learning-based approach to liver...

Cardiovascular disease, rather than liver decompensation, remains the leading cause of morbidity and mortality in patients with NAFLD and NASH. A significant proportion of the cardiovascular risk in NASH is likely attributable to shared metabolic risk factors. Nevertheless, there is much interest in understanding the independent contribution...