Obesity can progress alcoholic liver cirrhosis (LC) to liver dysfunction. So a study enrolled patients with alcoholic LC to investigate the association between the prognosis of steatohepatitis and body weight, along with fat accumulation. 

It was a single-centre retrospective study, done on 104 alcoholic LC patients without hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) which investigated factors related to poor prognosis. 

The observations of the study were as follows- 

• 3 independent relevant factors were identified by Cox regression analysis, that were- subcutaneous adipose tissue (SAT) index, total bilirubin level, and prothrombin time value. 
• For the cluster analysis, patients were categorized into three groups, i.e. 
• No adipose tissue accumulation (NAT group), 
• SAT prior accumulation (SAT group), and 
• Visceral adipose tissue prior accumulation (VAT group)
• Among these, the SAT group demonstrated a significantly poor prognosis of a 5-year survival rate. 
• Propensity score matching analysis of the SAT and VAT groups for matching patients backgrounds demonstrated no significant differences between them; however, the SAT group still had a poorer prognosis and lower level of hemostatic factors. 

Thus SAT accumulation type of obesity is a poor prognostic factor in alcoholic LC patients without HCC, and the hemorrhagic tendency might further worsen the prognosis.

Source- PLoS ONE, 2020;15(11): e0242582. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0242582