Transcript: James J Matera, DO, on the Spectrum of NASH and NAFLD for Primary Care Providers

James Matera: This is Dr. James Matera again. I am a clinical nephrologist and current Chief Medical Officer and senior vice president of Medical Affairs at CentraState Medical Center in Freehold, New Jersey.

The topic that we spoke about today was on the spectrum of NASH and NAFLD. And we started by summarizing the differences between those two but also talked quite a bit about epidemiology, clinical presentation, potential therapeutics, and of course, the downsides of these patients, particularly those that have metabolic syndrome and other issues like type two diabetes.

Some of the key takeaways that I think we had from this was distinguishing between the true NASH and NAFLD spectrum of disease, understanding the pathology, and the radiology that goes along with those. Which I think it's very important because of the difference in the long term cirrhosis rates.

We also talked about the subgroup of patients with the particular risk factors for this spectrum of diseases. And the fact that we're seeing this rise on an annual basis in the United States makes that very important. And as you've seen through the talk, it's the typical metabolic type patient that we always worry about to develop this.

The interesting thing, and the last takeaway that we had was how to try to manage these patients. Certainly, the top one that came to our mind was lifestyle modification, which is going to help with many of their disease states; obesity, type two diabetes. But we also touched on the role of bariatric surgery, and some up and coming pharmacological assessments that we could use for this.

So the true takeaway is not to take the "fatty liver" as a benign condition that we see in people who may be overweight and that they just have to lose weight to lose their fatty liver. It's a lot more than that and hopefully the message that came from our talks today will help you understand and look at your patients for this particular disease state and use it as a modifiable or potentially modifiable risk factor going forward. Thank you again for your time and attention.