Hello and welcome to the Zero to Finals podcast.

My name is Tom and in this episode I'm going to be talking to you about non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

If you want to follow along with written notes on this topic, you can follow along at zero tofinals.com slash N-A-F-L-D

or in the gastroenterology section of the zero definals medicine book.

Let's jump straight in. Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which abbreviates to NAFLD, forms part of

the metabolic syndrome. And this is a group of chronic health conditions related to processing

and storing energy,

and they increase the risk of developing things like heart disease, stroke and diabetes.

It's estimated that up to 30% of adults have non-alcoholic fatty liver disease,

and it's characterized by deposits of fat in the liver cells.

These fat deposits can interfere with the functioning in the liver cells. These fat deposits can interfere with the

functioning of the liver cells. Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease does not normally cause problems

initially, however later on it can progress to hepatitis and cirrhosis. So there's four stages

of non-alcoholic liver disease. The first one is simply non-alcoholic fatty liver.

The second one is non-alcoholic steato hepatitis, which is abbreviated to Nash, which is basically

hepatitis secondary to the fatty liver. The third is fibrosis of the liver, and the fourth is liver

cirrhosis. So what are the risk factors? Well, basically,

the risk factors are the same as for cardiovascular disease and diabetes. So this is things like

poor diet and low activity levels, obesity, type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol, middle aged and onwards, smoking and high blood pressure.

Next I want to talk about how to investigate abnormal liver function tests.

And this is quite a common problem that you'll see when you start work where you do some liver

function tests on a patient and find that they have some sort of abnormality

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