Prof G. Szabo reviews the learnings about alcohol consumption and liver disease that were presented during the Liver meeting 2019 in Boston.

I think there are going to be many take-home messages from this huge meeting. It’s very exciting, but one of the areas that I think is very relevant to NASH (non-alcoholic steatohepatitis) is the alcohol use in patients with NASH. There are several sessions on talking about alcoholic liver disease and alcoholic hepatitis where it’s increasingly recognised that many of the patients that are obese and have NASH, actually enjoy alcohol and sometimes they enjoy alcohol more than they should, so we are recognizing now that there is quite a bit of overlap between alcohol use that is beyond the safe limits in the population that is prone to develop NASH and both human studies and particularly animal studies indicate that excessive alcohol use can actually accelerate disease progression in NASH and vice versa. This is a new area and I think we have to stay tuned for it. Finally I want to point out that hepatitis C is being cured in our patient population, NASH and alcoholic liver disease are becoming the most frequent reasons for liver transplantations, so this is highly prevalent and a costly combination of diseases.