How Mild Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease Kills

Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD) is a pretty new concept. Twenty or thirty years ago, nobody was really talking about it.

Until now, most doctors have not been too worried about it unless it progressed to the more serious stages of fibrosis and cirrhosis.

But that will all change with a new study from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and Massachusetts General Hospital, published in the journal Gut.

They found that even the mildest cases of NAFLD could drastically increase your chance of dying early.

From previous studies, scientists already knew that NAFLD increases our risk of early death, but they wanted to know whether the stages of NAFLD differ in their death risk, and by how much.

To find out, they consulted Sweden’s national health registers to identify 10,568 people with NAFLD and matched each of them with five controls without NAFLD from the same registers. They were matched by age, sex, year of birth, and county.

All of the NAFLD cases had been confirmed via liver biopsies at Swedish hospitals, with the liver samples categorized from least to most serious as steatosis, non-fibrotic steatohepatitis, non-cirrhotic fibrosis, and cirrhosis.

Past studies had linked only the more serious stages—fibrosis and cirrhosis—with an increased risk of death, but this study was by far the largest and most comprehensive of its kind.

In general, the researchers found that people with NAFLD were 93% more likely to die early than those without it: 28.6 versus 16.9 per 1,000 person-years.

Regarding the stages of NAFLD, they found that all levels of severity increased the subjects’ risk of dying early.

1. Compared to those without NAFLD, those with simple steatosis had a 71% higher risk of death. Simple steatosis is the abnormal retention of fat in the liver.

2. Compared to those without NAFLD, those with non-fibrotic steatohepatitis had a 214% higher risk of death. Non-fibrotic steatohepatitis is inflammation of the liver that is accompanied by fat accumulation.

3. Compared to those without NAFLD, those with non-cirrhotic fibrosis had a 244% higher risk of death. Non-cirrhotic fibrosis is the thickening and scarring of liver tissue that occurs every time your liver tries to repair its cells after injury (such as injury caused by fat).

4. Compared to those without NAFLD, those with cirrhosis had a 379% higher risk of death. Cirrhosis is the stage in which the liver has been so overrun by scar tissue that it can no longer function or repair itself. The liver is unable to regenerate or recover.

The deaths were eventually caused by complete liver impairment (cirrhosis), liver cancer, other cancers, or cardiovascular disease.

The fact that the mildest form of NAFLD can increase the risk of early death by 71% should concern us all.

Even more concerning is that for most people, mild NAFLD will eventually progress to stage four.

So if you already have NAFLD, you absolutely must click here to learn the simple lifestyle changes that melt away liver fat in days…