Non Alcoholic Liver Disease

In this video I talk about NALD. I told you and warned you all about this before and so I've drawn it out on the board to show what leads to this disease.

80 million Americans have Non Alcohol Liver Disease and many of them don't know it. What exactly is NALD? This is where fat collects in the liver and that makes the liver cells not be able to filter and do exactly what the liver needs to do.

But globally, patients with Type 2 diabetes, more than 70% of them have this disease and more than 90% with type 2 diabetes have a BMI of over 35 have it. So weight has a big issue with this disease or syndrome. Most people don't know they have it until the later stages and it's important to know what the stages of this disease are.

The new guidelines are that they are calling for more screening especially if people are at high risk for this disease. Now what puts you at higher risk? That would be anybody with pre diabetes, diabetes, obesity, and/or 2 or more cardio metabolic risk factors. If you have heart disease and obesity, you're in that category. People with elevated liver enzymes for more than 6 months without all so that's why its called the NAFLD.

All though there are no treatments specifically for this disease, there are several diabetes medications that help with weight loss and that's the biggest help against this disease progression.

If you have NAFLD and it goes unchecked it advances to Progressive Steatosis. Steotosis is the fat that accumulates in your liver and then it becomes inflamed so they called that steatosis.

Then it comes down to non alcoholic Steatohepatitis and that's called NASH for short. Any times you hear the word NASH, it's referring to hepatitis. Then comes Fibrotic Nash where there's fibrosis in the liver because nothing has been done to help this situation.

Here's the big deal - the end stage NASH is cirrhosis. Just because someone has cirrhosis doesn't mean that it's from alcohol. it could be because of this disease and so weight has a whole lot to do with this. That's why I want to bring it to your attention and that would be one thing to work on especially if your diabetic because if your working on weight loss you're killing 2 birds with 1 stone.