Background: Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) has grown at an alarming rate with the rapid growth of obesity worldwide. the underlying pathological mechanism of NAFLD has not been completely explained. Visfatin is an adipocytokine that affects metabolic regulation in the body. We aimed in the current study to examine serum and relative expression level of visfatin in obese patients with NAFLD and to determine its correlation with the susceptibility and progression of NAFLD.
Methods: case-control study enrolled 40 obese patients had with biopsy-proven NAFLD and forty-five healthy volunteers. The enrolled cases were divided into three groups: simple steatosis (n=19), NASH (n= 13), and cirrhosis (n=8). We investigated serum visfatin by ELISA and the relative expression level of visfatin was investigated by RT‑PCR
Results: Our results revealed that values of serum visfatin were significantly (p < 0.001) higher in obese patients with NAFLD than in control subjects. Among NAFLD patients, the highest levels of serum visfatin and its relative expression were in the cirrhosis group (59.6±23.5,2.4±0.81, respectively), NASH(52.37±18.14,2.01±0.66, respectively), simple steatosis (43.9±9.81, 1.7±0.6, respectively) compared to the control group (14.76±2.51and0.75±0.17, respectively). We detected significant positive correlations between obesity indices, metabolic parameters, and liver enzymes among patients with NAFLD. Linear regression test showed that BMI, and waist/hip ratio, were the main predictors of both serum and expression levels of visfatin in NAFLD
Conclusion: Serum visfatin and its mRNA values are increased in NAFLD obese patients compared to controls. There are also higher levels of both markers in the cirrhosis subgroup compared to other groups.