However, advanced fibrosis, as determined by noninvasive fibrosis marker panels, is a significant predictor of mortality, mainly from cardiovascular causes, independent of other known factors. (HEPATOLOGY 2013) In the

past 25 years, the prevalence of obesity in the United States has more than doubled, a trend selleckchem that continues today without signs of slowing down.1, 2 In parallel, nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) has been recognized as the most prevalent liver disease in the United States and in many parts of the world.2, 3 However, the natural history of NAFLD is incompletely understood and its clinical and public health significance remains a matter of debate. NAFLD is a clinicopathological entity that encompasses

simple steatosis without fibrosis, nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) with varying stages of fibrosis, and cirrhosis. Patients with simple steatosis are thought to have benign prognosis,4 whereas those with NASH may develop progressive liver disease.5-7 One of the challenges in studying NAFLD in large groups of individuals is that the strict, traditional definition of NAFLD and NASH requires a liver biopsy, which makes it difficult to implement a selleck kinase inhibitor population-based study.8 Furthermore, characteristic features of NASH, such as steatosis, inflammation, and ballooning of hepatocytes, may diminish as fibrosis advances.9, 10 Although a consensus is lacking as to optimal surrogate indicators for NAFLD and NASH for large-scale, population-based, epidemiological studies, a number of noninvasive tools may be considered. First, for the diagnosis of steatosis, abdominal ultrasonography MCE公司 (USG) has been shown to have a sufficient degree of diagnostic accuracy.11 Second, methods to noninvasively diagnose hepatic fibrosis have been developed; they include serum marker panels and mechanical measures of liver stiffness, both of which have been correlated with hepatic fibrosis. Of those, the NAFLD fibrosis

score (NFS) and FIB-4 are scoring systems validated to identify or exclude advanced fibrosis in patients with a diagnosis of NAFLD.12-14 In addition, the aspartate aminotransferase (AST) to platelet (PLT) ratio index (APRI), originally created for chronic hepatitis C, is another simple marker that has been used for patients with NAFLD.15, 16 In this study, we took advantage of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) data to determine the mortality effect of NAFLD and advanced fibrosis in NAFLD. NAFLD is defined by the ultrasonographic appearance of the liver, whereas NFS, APRI, and FIB-4 score were used to detect NAFLD with a discernible degree of fibrosis. Thus, the aim of our study was to investigate the effect of NAFLD in general and that of NAFLD with fibrosis on overall and cause-specific mortality in the U.S. adult population.