World Liver Day is held on April 19 every year, as a global initiative, which aims to raise public awareness of the importance of keeping the liver healthy and preventing liver disease. The campaign was created with the aim of providing information on viral hepatitis, obesity, alcohol consumption and other causes of liver disease, as well as promoting early diagnosis and access to treatment. Also in Sicily, World Liver Day was an important opportunity to educate and inform on how to take care of your liver and on the need for greater attention to liver health on a global level. In Catania, in the Garibaldi hospital, a stand provided advice, data and information material on those liver diseases that are increasingly frequent due to bad lifestyles.
“Information is fundamental – explained Maurizio Russello (in the photo explaining to users the meaning of the initiative), director of the Hepatology Unit – as these diseases are subtle, silent, and patients end up discovering them in the most advanced stages , when it is much more difficult to cure them. There are more than one hundred liver diseases on which we can provide information and advice and which are mainly caused by viruses, high alcohol consumption, obesity and diabetes mellitus. The latter cause steatosis, or in any case the so-called fatty liver, which now affects a third of the world’s population. If we bring this data back to Sicily starting from the fact that the island has five million inhabitants, we can calculate that steatosis affects, broadly speaking, as many as one and a half million people”.
“The bad news is that fatty liver is the most frequent cause, according to recent data it occurs in twenty percent of cases, of chronic liver disease, cirrhosis and liver cancer – concludes Russello – but the good news is that we all have means to deal with this situation. Among other things, the US health authorities have recently approved the use of a new drug, Resmetirom, capable of resolving steatosis in thirty percent of cases”.
