Fatty liver and sleep apnea

People who are obese or overweight sometimes experience two conditions that often go undiagnosed, which are, fatty liver, the buildup of fat in the liver, and sleep apnea (snoring and/or interruptions of breathing during sleep).

Even though they happen to occur together in obese patients, researchers used to believe that these two conditions were not related. Recent studies however, suggest that the two may be strongly linked, and that fatty liver increase its chance of worsening in the presence of sleep apnea.

A study published in the journal Chest, last year, 226 obese middle-aged men and women, who were referred in suspect of having sleep apnea, two-thirds were found to have had fatty liver disease. The severity of fatty liver increased directly with the severity of their sleep apnea.

Another study that was also done last year, in The Journal of Pediatrics, found a similar relationship in children. 60 percent of children who were found to have sleep apnea, were subject to fatty liver disease. The worse the apnea, the more likely they were to have fibrosis, or scarring of the liver.

Although the reason of the link is still unknown, some doctors suspect that the loss of oxygen from sleep apnea may increase chronic inflammation, which worsens fatty liver. Although the fat in the liver can be harmless in the beginning, but after a while when the inflammation occur, the fat starts to scar liver tissues, which can lead to its failure.


Ultimately, it is clear that people who have particularly severe apnea should be checked for fatty liver disease, said Dr. Rohit Kohli, a co-director of the fatty liver disease center at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.
“If you have documented severe sleep apnea episodes during the night, you should be screened,” he said, “because we have enough evidence now from studies showing that one goes hand in hand with the other. And when you reverse one disease, it will probably help the other.”