Your Heart, Hepatitis C and Fatty Liver Disease
Cardiovascular Risk in Women with Fatty Liver Disease: Risk is Not Equal Opportunity
NAFLD has been recognized as a risk factor for cardiovascular incidents such as heart attack, heart failure, irregular heartbeat, and stroke. Because cardiovascular disease is generally known to occur less in women simply due to their female sex, researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, began to explore if sex-related differences in cardiovascular events persist in patients with NAFLD (Fatty Liver).
Alina M. Allen, M.D., assistant professor of Medicine at the Mayo Clinic’s Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, and her team compared 3,869 people who were diagnosed with NAFLD between 1997 and 2014 to 15,209 people without the disease. All of the people lived in the same community and were matched based on their age, gender, and pre-existing cardiovascular diseases. Dr. Allen and her team followed this cohort for up to 20 years and examined the number of new cardiovascular events that occurred in the men and the women after NAFLD diagnosis and their matched counterparts. They found that in subjects with NAFLD, the risk for these events was higher in women than in men but contrary to those without the liver disease. In NAFLD, they found that the protective effect of the female sex on cardiovascular risk disappears. They also found that cardiovascular events started at an early age for these women than in the general population. The findings suggest that cardiovascular risk assessment in NAFLD should consider sex-related differences, as women may require more aggressive preventative measures to avoid worse cardiovascular outcomes. Future studies should assess preventative measures that could lower this risk.
Hepatitis C and Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease
Hepatitis C is a viral illness that can cause long-term damage to the liver if it goes untreated. While this illness can affect both sexes, it may cause different symptoms and complications in females. Women can potentially pass the infection to a baby during childbirth. As a result, hepatitis C infections are especially important to detect in the female population. Hepatitis C increases the risk of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), a metabolic disease that generally occurs in overweight patients.
The Connection Between Cirrhosis and Hepatitis C
Hepatitis C can cause cirrhosis, but cirrhosis cannot cause hepatitis C. This is because a person must have exposure to the virus to get hepatitis C. Hepatitis C is a virus that people contract when they come into contact with the blood of someone who has hepatitis C.
Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease Patients Have Higher Rates of All Non-Liver-Related Cancers
NAFLD is used to describe liver complications that arise from the buildup of excess fat in the liver. NAFLD is estimated to affect more than 80 million Americans. Preliminary data from a new study presented at The Liver Meeting found that rates of malignancy occurring outside of the liver were higher in adults with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease than among adults across most types of cancers. Malignancy is among the most common causes of death in patients with NAFLD. To examine whether increased malignancy risk is similar across all types of cancers, researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota conducted a study to determine the rates of cancer diagnoses among NAFLD patients compared to other adults in the U.S. of similar age and sex.
Researchers identified 4,782 NAFLD patients and compared them to 14,441 age- and sex-matched controls living in Olmsted County, Minnesota between 1997 and 2016. They calculated age- and sex-adjusted incidence ratios of common cancers per 100,000 person-years between these two patient groups. The median age of the NAFLD patients was 54, and 54 percent were women. Median follow-up time was eight years. Overall, 16 percent of NAFLD patients and 12 percent of controls were diagnosed with malignancies during the study’s time span.
Rates of malignancy were higher for NAFLD compared to controls for most types of cancers. The increased malignancy rate for NAFLD patients was highest for liver cancer, followed by stomach cancer, pancreatic cancer, and uterine cancer. Overall, breast, prostate, and colon cancers were the three most common malignancies among NAFLD patients.