Grading scale of visceral adipose tissue thickness and their relation to the nonalcoholic fatty liver disease.

CONTEXT

The mesenteric fat is drained by the portal system, being related to the metabolic syndrome which is an impor-tant risk factor for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD).

OBJECTIVES

Graduate of visceral fat thickness and correlate with the NAFLD degree through ultrasonography method.

METHODS

We studied 352 subjects for age, gender, measures of subcutaneous fat thickness and visceral fat thickness as well as the presence and degree of liver fatty. Was analyzed the independent relationship between visceral fat thickness and NAFLD, and linear regression analysis was used in order to predict the visceral fat thickness from subcutaneous fat thickness.

RESULTS

The mean age of 225 women (63.9%) and 127 men (36.1%) was 47.5 ± 14.0 (18-77) years, 255 subjects had normal examinations, 97 had NAFLD thus distributed, 37 grade 1, 32 grade 2, and 28 grade 3. The subcutaneous fat thickness ranged from 0.26 to 3.50 cm with a mean of 1.3 ± 0.6 cm and visceral fat thickness ranged from 0.83 to 8.86 cm with a mean of 3.6 ± 1.7 cm. Linear regression showed that for every increase of 1 cm in subcutaneous fat thickness the visceral fat thickness will increase 0.9 cm.

CONCLUSIONS

The visceral fat thickness measured by ultrasonography is a useful and seems to be able to help estimate the risk of NAFLD.