TY  - JOUR
A1  - Teschke, Rolf
A1  - Wolff, Albrecht Titus
A1  - Eickhoff, Axel Stefan
A1  - Danan, Gaby
T1  - Is obesity rather than the dietary supplement used for weight reduction the cause of liver injury?
T2  - JGH open
N2  - Acute liver injury has been attributed to dietary supplements (DS) used for weight loss, but their causal role was much questioned, and obesity as an alternative cause of the liver injury remained unclear. A comprehensive search of the Medline database was conducted with terms that included "DS," "liver injury," "obesity," "obesity‐related liver diseases," and "nonalcoholic steatohepatitis." For each term, we focused on the first 50 publications. We undertook a manual search to identify additional reports. Underlying liver diseases and other health issues are common in patients taking DS for weight reduction. These include obesity or morbid obesity, as well as complex metabolic disorders complicated by excess morbidity and mortality due to associated liver diseases. Among these are nonalcoholic fatty liver disease with potential progression to nonalcoholic steatohepatitis and cirrhosis, often classified as cryptogenic with a rare risk of hepatocellular carcinoma. With the exception of hepatocellular carcinoma, these obesity‐related liver diseases were observed to varying degrees in patients, and some even required a liver transplant. This raises the question whether the liver injury that occurred in these patients is due to DS consumed for weight loss or to the underlying obesity‐related liver diseases. This analysis showed that, in many instances, the causal role of obesity has been neglected. Obesity‐associated liver diseases should be considered as differential diagnosis of liver injury in obese patients using DS.
KW  - dietary supplements
KW  - green tea extract
KW  - Herbalife
KW  - Hydroxycut
KW  - liver injury
KW  - liver transplantation
KW  - nonalcoholic fatty liver disease
KW  - nonalcoholic steatohepatitis
KW  - obesity
KW  - OxyELITE Pro
Y1  - 2018
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/48564
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-485645
SN  - 2397-9070
N1  - This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
VL  - 2
IS  - 4
SP  - 152
EP  - 157
PB  - Wiley
CY  - London
ER  -