1/3 of Americans have nonalcoholic fatty liver disease
Please exercise and eat smart because fat is destroying millions of Americans' livers:
Two-thirds of Americans are either overweight or obese, and doctors say they’re seeing more and more patients like Wilson Alvarado [whose liver disease caused him to become irrational and violent].
“It’s overwhelming how many patients we’re seeing with this problem,” says Dr. Naim Alkhouri, a hepatologist at the Cleveland Clinic.
Dr. William Carey, also a hepatologist at the Cleveland Clinic, adds, “This is huge. We didn’t even know this disease existed 30 years ago. Now it’s the most common liver disease in America.”
‘We won’t have the ability to treat all these patients’
About a third of the U.S. population has nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, according to Dr. Michael Curry, a hepatologist at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.
Curry said most of those people — about 80% — will not develop significant liver disease. The other 20% will develop a disease called nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, or NASH. Of those, about 20-30% will go on to develop cirrhosis and end-stage liver disease, where the only real treatment is a liver transplant.
“That’s about 6 million people. We won’t have the ability to treat all those patients,” Curry says. “If we even have a fraction of that number of patients, it will overwhelm liver transplant programs.”
Posted by James on Tuesday, June 21, 2011