New clinical practice guidelines for the diagnosis and management of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) are the first to be targeted specifically to primary care and endocrinology clinical settings.
They include 34 evidence-based clinical practice recommendations for screening, diagnosis, management, and referral, presented in a table and an algorithm flow chart as well as detailed text.
The new guidelines are by the American Association of Clinical Endocrinology (AACE) and co-sponsored by the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases. They were presented May 12 at the AACE Annual Meeting 2022 and simultaneously published in Endocrine Practice.
These are "the first of this type for this field of medicine. The vast majority of patients with NAFLD are being seen in the primary care and endocrinology settings. Only when they get to the more advanced disease are they being referred to the liver specialists. So, we need to be the ones who are diagnosing and managing these patients because there just aren't enough liver specialists to do that," Scott Isaacs, MD, co-chair of the writing panel for the guidelines, told Medscape Medical News.
80 Million Americans Have NAFLD, but Very Few Are Aware
The spectrum of NAFLD ranges from nonprogressive steatosis to the progressive conditions nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), fibrotic NASH, and end-stage NASH cirrhosis.
