Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: Type 2 diabetes has a relationship with fatty liver. Fatty liver can progress to liver fibrosis. This study examined relationship between liver fibrosis and diabetes-related complications in type 2 diabetic patients.

Methods: This study analyzed data from the 2007 to 2015 the Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (KNHANES) in South Korea. Which included values of c-peptide, fasting blood sugar, AST, ALT, and platelet to calculate parameter of homeostasis model assessment (HOMA) and fibrosis-4 scores (FIB-4). We compared FIB-4 scores by groups of normal glucose tolerance (NGT), impaired glucose tolerance (IGT) and diabetes. We also compared frequencies of diabete-related complications depending on the presence of liver fibrosis among diabetic patients.

Results: A total of 16,420 subjects were analyzed. Diabetes group showed higher FIB-4 scores than NGT or IGT groups (1.4±0.9 vs 0.9±0.6 vs 1.1±0.8). Among diabetes patients, liver fibrosis group (Fib-4 ≥1.45) had more hypertension (40.9% vs 17.8%), hypercholesterolemia (13.3% vs 6.5%), stroke (3.2% vs 1.4%), cardiovascular diseases (5.1% vs 1.4%), cataract (11.6% vs 4.5%) and glaucoma (1.5% vs 0.7%) than non-fibrosis group. Particularly, liver fibrosis increased risk of cardiovascular diseases such as myocardial infarction or angina (OR 11.01, 95% CI 1.64–73.94) by multivariate regression analysis.

Conclusion: Diabetes patients are more accompanied by liver fibrosis. Liver fibrosis increased risk of diabetes-related complications. Thus, early screening of liver fibrosis and fatty liver in diabetic patients is needed. And appropriate treatment would be helpful to prevent progression of diabetes-related complications.