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Exercise, diet improved conditions in nonalcoholic fatty liver disease
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Adding exercise to a diet regimen could benefit patients managing nonalcoholic fatty liver disease through an improvement in associated pathological conditions, according to research published in Metabolic Syndrome and Related Disorders.
At the University of Tsukuba in Japan, Sechang Oh, PhD, and colleagues recruited 72 adult men with obesity (aged 30-65 years; BMI >25) to take part in weight-loss interventions of their choice — diet and exercise (n=52) or diet alone (n=20) — for 3 months to evaluate effectiveness on nonalcoholic fatty liver disease management, specifically hepatic steatosis and underlying pathophysiology.
The diet-and-exercise group had 90 minutes aerobic exercise 3 days per week to increase heart rate to >40% of the maximum. Through weekly lectures, both diet-and-exercise and diet-alone groups received a diet program based on caloric intake of 1,680 calories per day; they attended group and individual sessions and kept food diaries. Participants underwent a comprehensive parameters analysis for pathophysiology.
Participants in the diet-and-exercise group, compared with those in the diet-alone group, showed improvement in degree of hepatic steatosis (–82.6% vs. –60%) and body weight (–13.3% vs. –8.9%), as well as in serum marker levels: inflammation, ferritin (–16.1% vs. –2.1%); oxidative stress, lipid peroxidation (–31.8% vs. 4.8%); adipokine imbalance, adiponectin and leptin (27.4% vs. 2.6% and –74.4% vs. –30.2%). Those in the diet-and-exercise group consequently achieved further attenuation of insulin resistance, based on the homeostasis model assessment of insulin resistance (HOMA-IR; –63.6% vs. –40%).
“To the best of our knowledge, these results represent the first clinical evidence on the effects of exercise against the progression of [nonalcoholic fatty liver disease] through a noticeable suppression of hepatic steatosis, obesogenesis, and proinflammatory and oxidative signaling pathways,” the researchers wrote, “demonstrating the advantage of the addition of exercise to a diet regimen.”
Disclosure: This work was partially supported by Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan.
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