Introduction: Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) has a high prevalence in pacients with type 2 diabetes mellitus and represents one of the most frequent causes of liver disease.
Objective: The aim of our study was to evaluate the relationship between hepatic steatosis and cardiovascular risk factors – hypertension, obesity and atherogenic dyslipidemia.
Methods: The observational study included 92 subjects with type 2 diabetes mellitus. We followed anthropo-metric indices, lipid profile, liver profile (including the degree of fat load – evaluated using ultrasonography) and blood pressure values.
Results: More than 90% of the subjects presented di-fferent degrees of hepatic fat load. We found a direct correlation between tryglicerides and the degree of he-patic steatosis and a negative correlation between the amount of fat load and HDLc. The incidence of normal systolic blood pressure (SBP) cases was significantly higher in subjects with normal liver or mild steatosis (50% vs. 29.69% with moderate or severe steatosis, p=0.04), while the cases of moderate and severe stea-tosis were significantly more frequent in subjects with abnormal SBP values (70.31%, vs. 50% in patients who-se SBP values were normal, p=0.0007). The incidence of cases with normal liver was significantly higher in subjects with normal diastolic blood pressure (DBP), in comparison with subjects whose DBP values were over the normal values (19.51%, vs. 2.22%, p=0.005). Also, we found a positive correlation between the degree of hepatic steatosis and the value of SBP.
Conclusions: T he results sustain the hypothesis that NAFLD can be a predictor of cardiovascular risk throu-gh its direct connection with SBP.