In this video, Arun Sanyal, MD, talks about which metabolic pathways are targeted when treating nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. He recently spoke about this topic at the 21st Annual Harvard Nutrition and Obesity Symposium on NAFLD.
Additional Resources:
Arun Sanyal, MD, is a professor of medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia.
TRANSCRIPT:
Hello, my name is Arun Sanyal, and I'm a professor of medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University. Today I will be talking about the metabolic basis for nonalcoholic fatty liver disease and the targeting of metabolic targets for therapeutics in NASH.
NASH, which is a phenotype of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease or NAFLD, is associated with insulin resistance, which is an essential subcomponent of the disease.
It is also important to remember that NASH does not occur in a vacuum. Most patients with NASH have other features that are associated with insulin resistance, such as obesity, hypertension, dyslipidemia, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, CKD, etc.
So, there is a growing interest in trying to identify common biology that affects multiple end organs in patients with these cluster of end-organ diseases to reduce the burden of therapeutics for this population. Whereas, in the past we used to think about the treatment of NASH in a very liver-centric way.
Increasingly now, we consider the anchor treatment of NASH to be the treatment of the root cause, which is the obesity, insulin resistance, that drives, not only the NASH, but also multiple other end-organ comorbidities that are commonly present in our patients.
Thank you everyone for listening to me today. I hope you enjoyed my presentation.
