Oxford, UK - March 29th 2021. New research published this month in Frontiers in Medicine (Gastroenterology) reveals that individuals with both obesity and severe fatty liver are five times more likely to require hospitalization for the illness. The non-invasive liver imaging technology — Perspectum's LiverMultiScan® — was used to gather MRI scans for the study.
Obesity is often associated with fat accumulation in the liver, which can lead to liver disease, and emerging data suggests that patients with obesity are at an increased risk of becoming seriously ill with COVID-19. The World Obesity Federation summarizes recent reports suggesting in the US almost 50 percent of people hospitalized with COVID-19 were also affected by obesity. A new report from the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S.A.) indicates 78 percent of people who were hospitalized, placed on a ventilator or died from COVID-19 were overweight or obese.
The results of the imaging study, which explored whether having excess liver fat could influence severity of COVID-19 in obese individuals, showed that individuals with both obesity as well as fatty liver were five times more likely to require hospitalization for COVID-19. Notably, individuals with obesity and normal liver fat were not at increased risk of being hospitalized.
"Some individuals with obesity have a normal level of liver fat and some non-obese individuals have high levels of liver fat. It is pertinent to establish whether pre-existing liver disease increases the risk of severe COVID-19 and how this relates to obesity," says Adriana Roca-Fernandez, first author and scientist at Perspectum, the company developing LiverMultiScan. "Measurement of liver fat and detection of liver disease can be achieved using non-invasive imaging methods such as Perspectum's well-validated, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology to help identify patients with COVID-19 who are at increased risk of severe disease."
Understanding the contribution of liver fat to COVID-19 risk and outcomes is important for clinical understanding and management of COVID-19 and long COVID. The study, "Hepatic Steatosis Rather Than Underlying Obesity Increases Risk of Infection and Hospitalization for COVID-19," Roca-Fernandez et al., 2021, also confirmed some previously reported risk factors for contracting COVID-19, such as being a male and having a lower socio-economic status. In addition, this study showed that the participants who had tested positive for COVID-19 were more likely to have higher liver fat. The MRI data were acquired before the COVID-19 pandemic by the UK Biobank, one of the largest biomedical databases in the world, and included 4,458 people who had later been tested for COVID-19.
