The UK’s obesity crisis is creating a liver disease ‘time bomb’, research has shown, with one in five young adults already showing excessive build-up of fat around their organs which can lead to serious damage.
Healthy livers contain little to no fat and build-ups, classed as non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), increase the risk of inflammation which can cause scarring and become life-threatening.
University of Bristol researchers, who have been leading the long-running Children of the 90s study with 4,000 young people born in the city who are now aged 24, found that 20.8 per cent of participants had fat build-ups in the liver indicating NAFLD and half of these cases were classed as “severe”.
One in 40 already showed signs of scarring (cirrhosis) on their livers which could mean further damage.
“Certainly high levels of fatty liver disease puts these young adults at greater risk of developing liver scarring (cirrhosis) in the long term,” Dr Kushala Abeysekera, who helped lead the study, told The Independent.
Presenting the study’s findings at the International Liver Congress in Vienna on Friday, he said they were concerned about the high rates of fatty liver disease in this very young patients.
While NAFLD is the most common form of liver disease, accounting for 20-30 per cent of cases, it is usually seen in older people.
But is becoming increasingly common in younger groups and the Bristol study is the largest to date to look at these rates.
Professor Philip Newsome, vice-secretary of the European Association for the Study of the Liver, said the study showed the increasing problems of our “obesogenic” (obesity causing) environment.
Cheap fast food and inactive lifestyles mean this is particularly a problem in the very young.
“This requires swift changes in public policy if we are to defuse the ticking time-bomb of obesity and NAFLD,” he said.
