Fatty Liver Symptoms

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Dr. Peter Kramer from Wrightsville Beach Family Medicine in Wilmington, North Carolina. There's a question about what are the fatty liver symptoms. The fatty liver symptoms most common would be no symptoms. Most folks with fatty liver don't have they have fatty liver. We tend to find fatty liver changes when we order a blood test and the liver enzymes may come back a little bit abnormal and we do further investigation with an ultrasound and we find out that fat cells have accumulated in the liver where normally there used to be liver function cells, or functioning liver cells, excuse me. So we'll then do some further investigation and make sure there are no other major problems, infections and medications causes and things like that but the majority of people have absolutely no symptoms whatsoever. And fatty liver nobody really seems to know what causes it although we do tend to see it in people that have increased inter abdominal fat and have an increased dietary intake of fat and so, one of the main functions of the liver is to process cholesterol and lipids for the body. And so there may be storage capacity problem in terms of the liver storing or processing lipids and cholesterols that increase the fatty liver or increase the fat stores within the liver and then give fatty liver changes. Fatty liver does not progress into any other problems it generally does not cause other then mild elevation of liver enzymes. It does not cause any long term disease and does not affect the synthetic function of the liver so generally it's pretty mild and we treat that with weight loss. If you have any of these symptoms or have any questions or concerns please contact your physician. And that's a little bit about fatty liver disease."