BMJ Group blogs: BMJ » Blog Archive » Richard Lehman’s journal review, 4 October 2010

Like about 40% of adults of my age in Western countries, I have a fatty liver, though I don’t qualify for having nonalcoholic fatty liver disease because I drink too much. If I wanted to know what is really happening to my liver I would have to have serial biopsies, as would several million people in the UK. This non-disease correlates with a number of other non-diseases such as asymptomatic reduced left systolic ejection fraction and pre-diabetes, and some real risk factors such as actual diabetes and high blood pressure. So I might die of vascular disease; or liver failure if I really overdo the wine; or else from cancer or general crumble or whatever else awaits me and everyone else. This paper on the risk of cardiovascular disease in patients with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease goes through the data and leaves me none the wiser: and by the way, these people are not patients and they don’t have a disease.

General crumble?