Prof Roden highlights the sessions dedicated to obesity and the metabolic syndrom held during the Liver meeting 2019 in Boston

So this year’s meeting of the AASLD in Boston specifically also addressed the role of NASH (non-alcoholic fatty liver disease) and also in the context of obesity and metabolic syndrome. So there was a huge session on the role of obesity and diabetes for the development of hepatocellular carcinoma. Because of the increase in obesity and diabetes, and the consecutive increase in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), we can expect that hepatocellular carcinoma, due to these diseases, will become a leading cause of liver death in the future and particularly here, a number of new drugs is tested with regard to efficacy in NASH and NAFLD. There has been another session which actually has not shown a lot of new promising data  from studies in humans using specific antifibrotic drugs, which actually refocuses on the  role of drugs that particularly act on metabolic targets such as PPARS. So PPAR agonists are the ones that actually address the key metabolic abnormalities in adipose tissue, but also in liver and this could particularly in the future, play an important role. PPARS is not only used in treatment of fatty liver disease, but also preventing liver-related complications.