Nonalcoholic Steatohepatitis NASH: Symptoms & Complications

To encompass a wide range of relevant articles, citations from reviews on similar topics were also manually searched. All rights are reserved, including those for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies. For all open access content, the Creative Commons licensing terms apply. Sleeping the recommended hours isn’t the only recipe for obtaining a healthy ‘sleep routine.’ It is also important to maintain a good pattern of sleep without interruptions that may prevent you from getting a good rest. The exact number that you get for a child’s waist circumference is not what is important, as each child grows at different rates and so each child may have a different number.

Symptoms of liver failure

These evaluations and knowledge about other conditions you may have can give a first indication of whether or not you may have NAFLD or NASH. Either your GP or doctor for internal medicine can decide if you should have an appointment with a liver specialist. A liver specialist should confirm the diagnosis, especially for those with advanced stage disease. These figures should be treated with some caution because they are based on studies that looked at the biopsies of patients and not everyone needs to have a liver biopsy. It is possible that the individuals who had liver biopsies may have already had more advanced NAFLD and so the aforementioned figures may overestimate the number of people who progress to advanced fibrosis and cirrhosis. The current understanding of NAFLD is that most patients only have fatty liver, without liver cell damage and inflammation (NAFL).

Continuing Education Activity

It usually doesn’t cause any symptoms and is often first detected by accident when an imaging study (such as an abdominal ultrasound, CT scan, or MRI) is requested for another reason. A fatty liver may also be identified on an imaging alcoholic liver disease test as a part of investigating abnormal liver blood tests. NAFLD is intimately related to conditions like diabetes and obesity. Understanding NAFLD and its causes, consequences, and treatment options is still a work in progress.

Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease: NAFL vs NASH

If liver damage from NASH leads to permanent scarring and hardening of your liver, this is called cirrhosis. Severe liver scarring, or cirrhosis, is the main complication of NAFLD and NASH. Cirrhosis happens because of liver injury, such as the damage caused by inflammation in NASH. As the liver tries to stop inflammation, it creates areas of scarring, also called fibrosis. With ongoing inflammation, fibrosis spreads and takes up more liver tissue. The most common type of liver cancer starts in cells called hepatocytes and is called hepatocellular carcinoma.

Characteristics of participants in this study

NAFLD is most common in middle-aged or older people, although younger people, including children, are also affected. However, a person with NAFLD may not have all or any of the other conditions that make up the metabolic syndrome, and individuals with some or all of those conditions may not have NAFLD. Because for most people, having simple fatty liver doesn’t cause sickness related to the liver, whereas those with NASH have inflammation and injury to their liver cells. This increases the risk of progression to more serious conditions like fibrosis (scarring) of the liver, cirrhosis, and liver cancer.

Other Names for This Condition

Researchers do not know the exact cause of NAFLD (now called MASLD), but there are some conditions that increase a person’s risk for this disease. Eat a healthy plant-based diet, exercise, and take your medications. This will get – and keep – your cholesterol and your triglyceride levels where they need to be.

New Nomenclature (Names) of NAFLD and NASH

• Ideally, a combined approach should result in a greater and sustained improvement of both conditions.
• This is mainly lifestyle changes – in particular, diet, weight loss and exercise for most people and giving up smoking if you smoke.
• This approach should avoid unsuccessful treatment of one problem because another problem is insufficiently treated, or because interventions on one problem do not take into account what is needed for the other.
• The sample is studied in a lab for signs of inflammation and scarring.
• While both NAFLD and ALD cause inflammation, fibrosis, and cirrhosis, they are different diseases with different causes and different treatment options.12,13 It is important to note that you can have both at the same time.

The monitoring is usually carried out by blood tests (preferably combining clinical and blood tests into non-invasive surrogate markers, i.e. NITs), ultrasound and elastography. Many NITs and monitoring methods are currently under development (see Section 5), with the objective of determining the state of the liver as precisely as possible while being non-invasive. If you have severe inflammation, it is recommended that the examination interval be conducted at least once a year (probably better every 6 months). In case of diabetes or heart disease, you should discuss whether the examination interval should also be shorter. In addition, it is important that you are also regularly examined for liver cancer (HCC monitoring).

• In some cases, your doctor may advise a liver biopsy, a procedure where the physician inserts a needle into the liver and extracts sample tissue, which is then examined under a microscope.
• Products that do not directly harm the liver can be problematic when you have liver disease.
• Intra-abdominal fat is more active, in terms of metabolic processes that are going on inside the cells.
• This may be due to rapid changes of fats and fatty acids in the blood that occur when weight loss is rapid.

When to contact a doctor

If you are not satisfied with the information you just read or any information on our website, please take a moment to send us your comments and suggestions on the type of content you would like to find on liver.ca. Please include the page you are commenting about in the subject line of your email. Health Canada recommends that getting at least 7-9 hours of sleep per night for adults is essential to maintain your health. Current guidelines recommend 9–11 hours of sleep per night for children ages 5–13 years old, and. When it comes to children, measuring waist circumference and your child’s height can help you determine if your child is depositing extra fat around the middle of their body.