Fatty liver children

The campaign to promote the natural feeding of infants, at least for the first six months of life, conducted over recent years has deep justification from a medical point of view. Numerous gynecological and pediatric societies around the world recommend breastfeeding as the most appropriate way of feeding infants. It has been proven that the benefits of this type of nutrition go beyond nutritional aspects, proper growth and development. The list of long-term metabolic benefits, which include reducing the incidence of obesity, allergies, infections and diabetes, is constantly growing...

OBJECTIVE: Metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD) is the leading cause of chronic liver disease in children. It is associated with significant intra- and extrahepatic comorbidity. Current guidelines lack consensus, potentially resulting in variation in screening, diagnosis and treatment practices, which may lead to underdiagnosing and/or insufficient treatment. The increasing prevalence of MASLD and associated long-term health risks demand adequate clinical management and consensus in guidelines...

BACKGROUND: The increasing prevalence of childhood obesity has become an urgent public health problem, evidence showed that intervention for childhood obesity bring enormous health benefits. However, an effective individualized intervention strategy remains to be developed, and the accompanying remission of related complications, such as nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), needs to be assessed. This study aimed to develop an m-Health-assisted lifestyle intervention program targeting overweight/obese children and assess its effectiveness on indicators of adiposity and NAFLD...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD) is a complex human disease. Common genetic variation in the patatin-like phospholipase domain containing 3 ( PNPLA3 ) and transmembrane 6 superfamily member 2 ( TM6SF2 ) genes have been associated with an increased risk of developing NAFLD, nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), and fibrosis in adults. The role of rare genetic variants in the development and progression of NAFLD in children is not well known. We aimed to explore the role of rare genetic variants in pediatric patients with advanced fibrosis...

OBJECTIVE: To assess efficacy and tolerability of semaglutide as a weight loss treatment for children living with comorbid obesity. DESIGN: Retrospective observational study of the first 50 children from a weight management service treated with semaglutide for at least 6 months. SETTING: A tertiary paediatric multidisciplinary weight management clinic in a UK hospital. PATIENTS: Aged 10-18 years old with a body mass index (BMI) SD score (SDS) >2 with a weight-related comorbidity (including insulin resistance (defined as homeostatic model assessment for insulin resistance >4), type 2 diabetes, metabolic-associated fatty liver disease, obstructive sleep apnoea or hypertension)...

OBJECTIVE: The increase in the prevalence of obesity, nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), and related comorbidities in children creates a social and financial burden. In our study, we aimed to evaluate liver findings together with anthropometric and laboratory data with twodimensional shear wave elastography (2D-SWE), one of the SWE types, which is a noninvasive method for assessing tissue stiffness in children with obesity, and to obtain quantitative data that can be used in early diagnosis and follow-up...

UNLABELLED: Altered gut microbiota and metabolites are important for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) in children. We aimed to comprehensively examine the effects of gut metabolites on NAFLD progression. We performed integrative metabolomics (untargeted discovery and targeted validation) analysis of non-alcoholic fatty liver (NAFL), non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), and obesity in children. Fecal samples were collected from 75 subjects in the discovery cohort (25 NAFL, 25 NASH, and 25 obese control children) and 145 subjects in an independent validation cohort (53 NAFL, 39 NASH, and 53 obese control children)...

BACKGROUND: Limited research on alanine aminotransferase (ALT) screening for metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD) among US Asian/Pacific Islander (PI) children necessitates investigation in this heterogeneous population. OBJECTIVE: Examine ALT elevation among Asian/PI children with overweight or obesity. METHODS: Elevated ALT prevalence (clinical threshold) and association with body mass index ≥85th percentile were compared among 18 402 Asian/PI and 25 376 non-Hispanic White (NHW) children aged 9-17 years using logistic regression...

INTRODUCTION: Due to a steep increase in obesity, metabolic dysfunction-associated fatty liver disease (MAFLD) has also become the most common chronic hepatic condition among children and adolescents. Various maternal and pregnancy-related factors have also been implicated in the development of MAFLD, but human studies remain scarce. MATERIAL AND METHODS: Comprehensive data of 460 overweight or obese children aged 2-16 years were collected and combined with data on selected maternal and pregnancy-related factors for a case-control study...

BACKGROUND AND AIM: The aim of this study was to investigate the comprehensive genetic effects of exploratory variants of LYPLAL1, GCKR, HSD17B13, TRIB1, APOC3, MBOAT7, and PARVB on pediatric nonalcoholic fatty liver disease in addition to the previously reported variants of TM6SF2, PNPLA3, and SAMM50 in Korean children. METHODS: A prospective case-control study was conducted involving 309 patients diagnosed using ultrasound and 339 controls. Anthropometric measurements, liver function tests, and metabolic marker analysis were conducted, and fibrosis scores were calculated...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: The American Academy of Pediatrics endorses metabolic and bariatric surgery (MBS) as a safe and effective treatment of severe obesity in children with class 3 obesity or with class 2 obesity and qualifying comorbidities. The study objective was to determine eligibility and characteristics of adolescents who qualify for MBS based on American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines. METHODS: This retrospective cohort study analyzed electronic health record data of 603 051 adolescents aged 13 to 17 years between January 1, 2018, and December 31, 2021...

Metabolic dysfunction-associated fatty liver disease (MAFLD) is a multisystem disorder characterized by the presence of fatty liver degeneration associated with excess adiposity or prediabetes/type 2 diabetes or metabolic dysregulation. An intricate relationship between the liver and thyroid has been reported in both health and disease. Simultaneously, there is a strong correlation between obesity and both MAFLD and thyroid dysfunction. In this narrative review, we highlighted the relationship between MAFLD and thyroid function in children and adolescents with obesity in order to explore how thyroid hormones (THs) act as predisposing factors in the onset, progression, and sustainability of MAFLD...

OBJECTIVE: Pediatric nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is a growing problem, but its underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. We used transcriptomic reporter cell assays to investigate differences in transcriptional signatures induced in hepatocyte reporter cells by the sera of children with and without NAFLD. METHODS: We studied serum samples from 45 children with NAFLD and 28 children without NAFLD. The sera were used to induce gene expression in cultured HepaRG cells and RNA-sequencing was used to determine gene expression...

BACKGROUND: Alanine aminotransferase (ALT) is widely used to screen patients with hepatic diseases. However, the current reference ranges (< 50 U/L) were developed by laboratories and have not been validated in populations with a large number of healthy individuals. METHODS: This study collected venous blood and anthropometric data from a total of 13,287 healthy children aged 3 months to 18 years who underwent routine physical examinations in the Department of Pediatric Healthcare...

In clinical studies of chronic diseases, the effectiveness of an intervention is often assessed using "high cost" outcomes that require long-term patient follow-up and/or are invasive to obtain. While much progress has been made in the development of statistical methods to identify surrogate markers, that is, measurements that could replace such costly outcomes, they are generally not applicable to studies with a small sample size. These methods either rely on nonparametric smoothing which requires a relatively large sample size or rely on strict model assumptions that are unlikely to hold in practice and empirically difficult to verify with a small sample size...

Over-consumption of fructose in adults and children has been linked to increased risk of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). Recent studies have highlighted the effect of fructose on liver inflammation, fibrosis, and immune cell activation. However, little work summarizes the direct impact of fructose on macrophage infiltration, phenotype, and function within the liver. We demonstrate that chronic fructose diet decreased Kupffer cell populations while increasing transitioning monocytes. In addition, fructose increased fibrotic gene expression of collagen 1 alpha 1 (Col1a1) and tissue metallopeptidase inhibitor 1 (Timp1) as well as inflammatory gene expression of tumor necrosis factor alpha (Tnfa) and expression of transmembrane glycoprotein NMB (Gpnmb) in liver tissue compared to glucose and control diets...

BACKGROUND: Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) has rapidly become the most common cause of chronic liver disease in children and adolescents, but its etiology remains largely unknown. Adrenarche is a critical phase for hormonal changes, and any disturbance during this period has been linked to metabolic disorders, including obesity and dyslipidemia. However, whether there is a causal linkage between adrenarche disturbance and the increasing prevalence of NAFLD in children remains unclear...

The article aims to find potential biomarker for the detection of tubular damage in pediatric neurogenic bladder (NB) by investigating urinary levels of liver-type fatty acid-binding protein (uL-FABP). This prospective analysis was conducted on two groups: 42 children with NB and 18 healthy children. The uL-FABP concentrations were measured using ELISA methods. The medical charts of the children were examined to determine age, sex, anthropometric measurements, activity assessment using Hoffer's scale, and renal function parameters...

INTRODUCTION: Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease is the leading cause of pediatric chronic liver disease. Although nonalcoholic fatty liver disease is closely associated with obesity, its relationship with metabolic syndrome in children is not fully understood. The main aim of this study was to evaluate the association between nonalcoholic fatty liver disease and a combination of cardiometabolic risk factors in adolescents with overweight/obesity, using a pediatric metabolic syndrome score (PsiMS) to predict metabolic syndrome...

Metabolic-(non-alcoholic) associated fatty liver disease (MAFLD/NAFLD) has increasingly become a worldwide epidemic. It has been suggested that renaming NAFLD to MAFLD is critical in identifying patients with advanced fibrosis and poor cardiovascular outcomes. There are concerns that the progression to non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) may become a constant drive in the future healthcare of children and adolescents. There is a necessity to tackle the emerging risk factors for NASH-associated hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC)...