Non Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease- Is It Always Benign?

Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is the most common liver disease observed in the clinical practice of hepatology affecting approximately 20 % of the general population. It is increasingly apparent that non alcoholic steatohepatits (NASH) and NAFLD are not Western disease. There is evolution of Western-style life among the Asian population and NASH has increasingly been diagnosed in several regions in Asia. NASH is considered as a type of a larger spectrum of NAFLD that is a consequence of insulin resistance and other underlying factors with histological findings ranging from fatty change alone to fat plus inflammation, to fat plus ballooning degeneration, and to fat plus alcoholic hepatitis-like lesions including Mallory body and fibrosis, the latter two categories being considered as NASH. Although liver biopsy is currently the gold standar