Exercise helps managing fatty liver

Exercise can help people with fatty liver improve their health even if they don't lose weight.

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is a common liver disease. People with NAFLD have high levels of liver enzymes (indicating damage to the liver) fat bellies and insulin resistance. NAFLD can progress to cirrhosis, an irreversible condition in which scar tissue replaces healthy liver tissue.

While increasing physical activity and eating healthier are currently the main recommendations for treating NAFLD, it's still not clear whether becoming more active and boosting fitness might benefits NAFLD patients, other than weight loss.

To investigate this, researchers assigned 141 Australians to an exercise intervention including three individualised counselling sessions; six counselling sessions; or a control group who received just one counselling session at the study's outset. Sessions happened every two weeks for the exercise groups.

The counsellors encouraged exercise group participants to get at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity to maintain their health, and 200 minutes weekly if they wanted to lose weight. Walking was the most frequently recommended exercise.

Three months after the study began, the exercise group participants were nine times more likely than control group participants to have boosted their exercise time by at least an hour a week. Even if the people who increased their exercise by at least an hour didn't lose weight, they did trim their waists. Adding this much activity also cut liver enzyme levels, while increasing activity even more didn't produce additional reductions in liver enzymes.

People who became fitter during the course of the study also showed greater improvement in LDL cholesterol levels, insulin resistance, and other key measurements of metabolic health than those whose fitness levels didn't change or worsened. Improvement was most dramatic for people with poor fitness at the study's outset.

The above findings indicate that a good physical activity regime provides health benefits for patients with fatty liver, independent of changes in their weight.