The development of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is strongly associated with the
metabolic syndrome as reflected by the fact that approximately 90% of the patients with
NAFLD have more than one feature of metabolic syndrome and about 33% have three or
more criteria. The physiopathology, epidemiology and therapeutic considerations of the
disease are reviewed here. Lipotoxicity plays a predominant role in the pathophysiology of
both entities. It leads to accumulation of triglycerides in the liver as a result of an imbalance …

Background Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), as conventionally recognized, is a
metabolic disorder largely confined to residents of affluent industrialized Western countries.
However, obesity and insulin resistance are not restricted to the West, as witnessed by their
increasingly universal distribution. In particular, there has been an upsurge in metabolic
syndrome in the Asia-Pacific region, although there are critical differences in the extent of
adiposity between Eastern and Western populations.