Non-alcoholic hepatic steatosis. Biochemical-echo-histopathologic relation

Abstract

The term non-alcoholic hepatic steatosis is used to describe the non-alcoholic hepatitis histological findings in patients who, without a history of substantial alcohol consumption, in their hepatic biopsies show elements that cannot be distinguished from those of the patients with alcoholic hepatitis. This entity is nowadays a health problem that has to be studied to look for strategies that will allow detecting it with more sensible and workable resources. In this research we assessed the clinical, humoral, and echographic behavior in 20 patients attended at the High Institute of Military Medicine Dr Luis Díaz Soto, with histological diagnoses of the disease, in the period from January 2005 to April 2007. The results showed that the predominant clinical conditions were overweight and arterial hypertension, including the 95 % and 40 % respectively, in relation with the primary metabolic syndrome. There it was a relation between the echographic diagnosis and the clinic-biologic alterations respecting the histology in more than three fourth of the sick patients. The triglycerides dosage, the alanino- aminotransferase, the aspartoaminotransferase, and the RITIS index, were the most useful biochemical markers in the diagnosis of these patients. The biochemical studies that showed a higher differentiation capacity between the kinds of the disease were the bilirubin and the RITIS index.