Fatty liver is a disease where the liver accumulates fat excessively. Fatty liver commonly causes minor abnormalities of liver function or barely have symptoms. However, fatty liver can cause serious disease if it is left untreated.
What is Fatty Liver
Fatty liver disease or hepatic steatosis is the disease caused by the excessive storage of the fat in the liver. This disease may not be severe or cause any destruction to your liver directly at first, but it can be the indication or cause of other liver diseases, such as inflammation and liver failure as the worst condition you can experience. Fatty liver is normally happened to person who consume the large amount of alcohol beverage for a long time or someone with obese.
Signs of Fatty Liver
Even the fatty liver may not show severe symptoms, it will still indicate some symptoms that are the sign of fatty liver.
- Abdominal pain
- Exhaustion or fatigue
- Nausea
- Jaundice ( skin and eyes are turning to yellow.)
- Weight loss
- Red palms
- Abdominal swollen (or “ascites”)
- Legs swollen (known as “edema”)
Is Fatty Liver Disease Fatal?
Fatty liver doesn’t result any serious problems or symptoms to body directly. However, if it is left untreated for a long time, this disease can proceed to fibrosis and cirrhosis which are more severe stages than fatty liver. Moreover if you still don’t get any treatment, cirrhosis will worsen your health condion with scarring liver and lead to liver failure, cancer, including fatality.
Diagnosis for Fatty Liver
Fatty liver is known as the disease in which it displays no symptoms. In order to diagnose the disease, the doctor will suggest you to:
- Fibro scan: An ultrasound method that assesses the fatty changes and the hardness of the liver.
- Ultrasound or CT scan: This procedure will capture the picture of your liver.
- Liver biopsy: This process will take a sample of your tissue liver for laboratory testing in order to search for any abnormalities in your liver.
How to Treat Fatty Liver
As everyone knows, fatty liver still has no treatment that can completely cure the disease. However,in order to cure or slow down the progression of fatty liver, the doctor will suggest you to change your lifestyles which is the major factors casing the disease. These are the way in preventing and improving on your health condition.
- The alcohol beverages should be limited or avoided.
- Losing and balancing weight will help prevening the excessive fat in the liver.This can be done by exercise or eating healthy.
- Controlling your diet and choosing healthier one is also recommended because they help in calories’ control and cholesterol reduction. This way also help you avoid diatbete or obese.
- You may abstain any supplements that can affect on your liver. However there are some kind of supplements, such as vitamin E and thiazolidinediones, also known as glitazones, in which it is the medicine using for curing diabetes.
How to Prevent Fatty Liver
As it mentioned above, we can prevent ourselves from fatty liver and stay healthy following these lists.
- You should avoid or limit the alcohol drinking behavior
- Following the doctor’s prescription is the best way in taking supplements.
- Exercising and consuming healthy diet help balancing your weight to stay in the healthy stage.
What Is a Good Diet For Fatty Liver?
It is known that changing your lifestyles is the best way to treat fatty liver and one of the step that need to be taken seriously is eating healthy diet. Healthy diet will help losing weight because they contains good nutrition and the most preferred healthy diet reccommented by doctors is Mediterranean diet. The Mediterranean diet mostly has plant-based dishes and in those dishes include whole grains, vegetables, fruits, legumes, and good fats.
How Long for a Fatty Liver to Heal?
Fatty liver can be healed within 6 weeks and up to 2 months according to what kind of fatty liver you have, any symptoms you get or other complication disease you’ve been diagnosed with. If you notice fatty liver early and try to change your lifestyle, such as, you are having alcoholic fatty liver type, abstaining from alcohol will cause the fat in the liver to be lowered slowly. Besides, if you have nonalcoholic fatty liver, the weight loss in the option for this type of the disease’s treatment. These action can make the reversion of fatty liver is possible and also prevent the progression of the disease from getting to worst liver disease, such as cirrhosis.
Fatty Liver Conclusion
To conlude, fatty liver is the liver disease in which the liver stores large amounts of fat in the liver. The disease mostly is caused by excessive cunsumtion of alcohol or obese Fatty liver won’t show any serious symptoms and most of the common symptoms are the pain in abdomen and fatigue. However, if the fatty liver is left without getting treatments or adjusting your daily life routine, it can lead to serious liver disease, such as fibrosis, cirrhosis and cancer, even lead to liver failiur as the worst condition. Although fatty liver is not very serious in the begining, it should better not be ignored, and you shoul make an appointment with the specialist to start treating the disease.