What should you do if alcoholic liver disease and fatty liver disease occur after the holidays?

The lively Spring Festival holiday of the Year of the Rabbit is over. During the Spring Festival, every household had a rich variety of dishes, increased intake of high-oil and high-fat foods, more drinking and socializing, and irregular work and rest schedules, which led to physical overdraft and the liver was in an overloaded state.

The burden on the liver increases, and many people accidentally suffer from alcoholic liver disease and fatty liver disease. So, do you know about them?

What is fatty liver disease?

Fatty liver disease, abbreviated as fatty liver, is a clinical syndrome caused by various reasons and characterized by diffuse fatty changes in liver cells. In other words, too much fat accumulates in liver cells, affecting the normal function of the liver.

Fatty liver is divided into: alcoholic liver and non-alcoholic fatty liver

According to the causes of fatty liver, we can divide fatty liver into two categories: one is called non-alcoholic fatty liver, which can be caused by various reasons such as obesity and malnutrition; the other is called alcoholic fatty liver, also known as alcoholic liver, and the main cause of the disease is drinking.

What is the difference between the two types of fatty liver disease?

Pathogenic factors. The main causative factor of alcoholic fatty liver is drinking; while non-alcoholic fatty liver is mostly caused by obesity and uncontrolled diet. In a small number of people, fat metabolism disorders cause fat to accumulate in the liver, which in turn causes fatty liver.

Symptoms. Mild fatty liver usually has no obvious symptoms, while severe fatty liver will produce various discomfort symptoms, such as loss of appetite, fever, fatigue, pain in the liver area, and upper abdominal pain. Alcoholic liver disease is accompanied by pain in the liver area, abdominal pain, loss of appetite, and even jaundice and edema. In the late stage of the disease, it will develop into alcoholic cirrhosis, with serious complications such as upper gastrointestinal bleeding and ascites.

Difficulty in cure. Alcohol is a type of carcinogen that can directly damage liver cells and is highly addictive. Therefore, patients with alcoholic liver disease are more difficult to control, the disease progresses rapidly, and the chances of developing cirrhosis and liver cancer are greater. Fatty liver disease can be completely reversed in the early stages through active treatment, increased exercise, and adjusted diet, and the chances of cure are much higher than for alcoholic liver disease.

Patients with fatty liver and alcoholic liver should do this in their daily life

Patients with fatty liver need to control their diet, choose high-vitamin and low-sugar, low-fat foods, eat more fresh vegetables and fruits, participate in more outdoor sports, and supplement selenium appropriately.

Patients with alcoholic liver disease should provide a high-protein, low-fat diet on the basis of quitting drinking, and pay attention to supplementing vitamin B, vitamin C, vitamin K and folic acid; exercise appropriately to prevent muscle atrophy, strive to walk briskly for more than 20 minutes a day, and do some resistance exercises. Patients with severe alcoholic hepatitis should also consider adding meals at night to avoid muscle atrophy. If patients with alcoholic liver disease are overweight or have abdominal obesity, they need to control their total calorie intake and lose weight appropriately to promote complete recovery from liver disease.

When patients with fatty liver and alcoholic liver disease experience fatigue, abdominal distension, loss of appetite, and especially jaundice and other obvious discomforts, they should go to a specialist hospital in time and receive appropriate treatment under the guidance of a specialist physician.