In a new study, researchers have discovered important differences in the biological pathways that lead to cancer for alcoholic fatty liver disease compared to a non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
The findings of the study presented at the Experimental Biology meeting 2019, could benefit more than 3 million people diagnosed with fatty liver disease each year.
The build-up of fat in the liver known as fatty liver disease sometimes leads to hard-to-treat liver cancer.
Scientists have not been able to understand why the cancer risk is higher for fatty liver disease caused by excessive alcohol consumption than for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which is associated with obesity and type 2 diabetes.
"We want to find out the key factors and pathways that lead to liver cancer in fatty liver patients so we can slow or even prevent the liver cancer. It is estimated that this type of liver cancer is responsible for 250,000 to 1 million deaths each year," said Yue Jia, who conducted the study.
In the study, the researchers examined expression levels of proteins in liver biopsies from a group of patients with alcoholic fatty liver disease and a group with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
More From This Section
The proteins studied are involved in epigenetic regulation, which controls gene expression, and inflammation, which plays an important role in the disease.
The researchers observed that the two groups of patients showed significant differences in the expression of proteins involved in epigenetic regulators and inflammation.
Importantly, these differences matched the ratio of liver cancer development seen for the two groups."If through additional studies, we can prove that the molecules and pathways we identified modulate liver cancer development in the alcoholic fatty liver disease or non-alcoholic fatty liver disease patients, it may help identify new targets for preventing or reducing the risk of liver cancer that arises from other liver diseases," said Jia.
The researchers plan to perform additional experiments in animal models of fatty liver disease to learn more about how epigenetic regulation and inflammation pathways lead to liver cancer.