12% of US adults have obesity-related liver disease

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At the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, the liver transplant group is busy handling an onslaught of patients who have come from all over the country in hopes of a chance at life. For many, a liver transplant is their last hope, after being diagnosed with a deadly disease sweeping the nation at epic proportions. People crowd the unit and undergo scores of testing and evaluation in an effort to get on the hospital's coveted transplant list. It's a program with a 94 percent survival rate after liver transplant, one of the highest in the nation.

For many the culprit is a serious form of fatty liver disease called nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, also known as NASH. An outgrowth of the obesity epidemic in the Western world and around the globe, it causes scarring and inflammation that can lead to liver cirrhosis, cardiac and lung complications, liver cancer and death. Yet few people know about it.

Across the United States, millions of people of all ages suffer from this silent killer that slowly morphs from nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, a condition that now affects 89 million in the U.S., according to the Center for Disease Analysis. The National Institutes of Health estimates as many as 30 million people, or 12 percent of U.S. adults, now have NASH.

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What is even scarier is the fact that liver specialists are seeing patients that are younger and younger with this disease due the rising obesity rates. "Today we are seeing people in their 20s and 30s with NASH," says Dr. Leona Kim-Schluger, a hepatologist and professor at the Recanati/Miller Transplantation Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. "There is even NASH in the pediatric population."

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Scientific research from the National Institutes of Health shows that "fructose is a weapon of mass destruction" that increases fatty liver disease and is poorly absorbed by the gastrointestinal tract and almost entirely metabolized by the liver, since cells don't use fructose for energy.

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