In Children
Pediatric Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD) was first reported in 1983. It is currently the primary form of liver disease among children. NAFLD has been associated with the metabolic syndrome, which is a cluster of risk factors that contribute to the development of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes mellitus. Studies have demonstrated that abdominal obesity and insulin-resistance in particular are thought to be key contributors to the development of NAFLD. Because obesity is becoming an increasingly common problem worldwide, the prevalence of NAFLD has been increasing concurrently. Moreover, boys are more likely to be diagnosed with NAFLD than girls with a ratio of 2:1. Studies have suggested that progression toward a more advance stage of disease among children is dependent on age and presence of obesity. This finding is consistent with previous studies in adults demonstrating the same association between age and obesity, and liver fibrosis. Early diagnosis of NAFLD in children may help prevent the development of liver disease during adulthood. This is challenging as most children with NAFLD are asymptomatic with few showing abdominal pain. Currently, liver biopsy is considered the gold standard for diagnosing NAFLD. However, this method is invasive, costly and bears greater risk for children, and noninvasive screening and diagnosing methods would have significant public health implications for children with NAFLD. The only treatment shown to be truly effective in childhood NAFLD is weight loss.
Read more about this topic: Non-alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease
Famous quotes containing the word children:
“Creativity becomes more visible when adults try to be more attentive to the cognitive processes of children than to the results they achieve in various fields of doing and understanding.”
—Loris Malaguzzi (20th century)
“The shift from the perception of the child as innocent to the perception of the child as competent has greatly increased the demands on contemporary children for maturity, for participating in competitive sports, for early academic achievement, and for protecting themselves against adults who might do them harm. While children might be able to cope with any one of those demands taken singly, taken together they often exceed children’s adaptive capacity.”
—David Elkind (20th century)