People who suffer a first psychotic episode are at high risk of developing liver disease – Acta Sanitaria

People who have suffered a first episode of psychosis have a high risk of developing, in the short term, liver pathology, specifically hepatic steatosis (also known as fatty liver disease), as concluded by a collaborative study led by researchers in the area of Mental Health of the Network Biomedical Research Center (CIBERSAM), at the Virgen del Rocío University Hospital in Seville-Seville Institute of Biomedicine (IBIS); and from the Liver and Digestive Diseases area of ​​the CIBER for Liver and Digestive Diseases (CIBEREHD) at the Cantabrian Marqués de Valdecilla University Hospital-Valdecilla Health Research Institute (IDIVAL) in Santander, which publishes the journal Schizophrenia Research.”Patients who suffer a first episode of psychosis have a higher risk of presenting weight gain and metabolic alterations such as diabetes, dyslipidemia, or metabolic syndrome”, explains Dr. Javier Vázquez, who is a researcher at CIBERSAM, the Marqués de Valdecilla University Hospital and IDIVAL, and one of the coordinators of this work. In the general population, it is known that these metabolic alterations are closely associated with the appearance of one of the most common liver pathologies, fatty liver (hepatic steatosis), which can evolve into more serious forms and chronic liver disease. “Given that patients with psychosis have a higher risk of presenting weight gain and metabolic alterations, the objective of this study was to see if they also present liver involvement more frequently,” says Javier Vázquez. analyzed data from 160 people who had suffered a first episode of psychosis, comparing them with 66 individuals without mental pathology, as a control group. In these patients, metabolic and hepatic changes were evaluated over three years, through the fatty liver index (FLI).Fatty liver”The study found that, within the first three years from the debut of their first psychotic episode, up to a fifth of the patients (21.9%) developed fatty liver”, explains the head of the CIBEREHD group at the Marqués de Valdecilla–IDIVAL University Hospital, Dr. Javier Crespo. In contrast, only 3 percent of the individuals without psychosis belonging to the control group of the study presented hepatic steatosis in that period.”In addition, the presence of fatty liver was associated with a worse evolution in metabolic parameters and with the appearance of metabolic syndrome and high blood pressure in patients with this Mental Health disorder”, concludes this CIBEREHD researcher.