The liver suffers silently A fatty liver can cause permanent organ damage

Sick metabolic organ: fatty liver under stress

Wrong eating habits and other risk factors make the liver sick. A high-calorie, high-fat and high-sugar diet can kill the organ as well as high levels of alcohol. On the other hand, fasting can degrade a fatty liver in a timely manner. German researchers are now investigating how pathological processes burden the detoxification center of our body.

Every third German has a fatty liver

Incorrect eating habits and other risk factors such as high alcohol consumption can make the liver sick. The metabolic organ greases and can ignite. According to health experts, more than one third of Germans have fatty liver disease. However, many do not know anything about it at first because the liver suffers dangerously quiet. In the long run, irreversible and life-threatening organ damage threatens. German researchers are now investigating how obesity and inflammation weaken the body's detoxification center.

Incorrect eating habits and other risk factors such as high alcohol consumption can make the liver sick. German researchers are now investigating how obesity and inflammation weaken the body's detoxification center. (Image: magicmine / fotolia.com)

Disease often goes unnoticed for a long time

Because the disease of the organ usually remains unrecognized for a long time, due to a fatty liver unnoticed can develop a chronic liver inflammation.

The result can be liver cirrhosis ("shrinking liver") or even liver cancer after many years.

Experts from the Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) in Berlin have now looked at liver cells in the Petri dish, as laxity and inflammation weaken the body's detoxification center.

"The results show that above all inflammation blocks the work of important enzymes of the liver cell," explains Professor. Dr. Andreas Hensel, President of the BfR, in a statement.

"This allows the liver to perform its task of detoxifying nutrients ingested with food only to a limited extent."

A change in diet and regular exercise are very important to reduce fatty liver. (Source: healing practice)

New insights won

So far, it is not fully understood how a fatty and inflamed liver affects its ability to recognize and degrade foreign substances such as chemicals or drugs.

In collaboration with the dr. Margarete Fischer-Bosch Institute for Clinical Pharmacology in Stuttgart, BfR researchers treated human liver cells with fatty acids, pro-inflammatory substances and foreign substances.

In this way they recreated the conditions in the liver and recorded how the cells responded.

The main result: While a mere fatty liver had no far-reaching consequences for the detoxification, this changed when an inflammation was produced, as the scientists report in the journal "Drug Metabolism and Disposition".

The ability to neutralize foreign substances is therefore probably significantly reduced in a fatty liver inflammation. (Ad)