Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease in Patients With Type 2 Diabetes: Modern Imaging Modalities

Abstract

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is the most prevalent chronic liver disease worldwide and one of the most common cause of liver transplantation in developed countries. Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is an important risk factor for NAFLD. Additionally, T2DM is believed to accelerate the progression of NAFLD. Therefore, the use of different imaging modalities in this patient cohort appears to be more important than in patients with NAFLD without diabetes mellitus. Moreover, NAFLD is often overlooked in clinical practice. It should be noted that the gold standard for diagnosing NAFLD is still a liver biopsy, however, the method has a number of obvious disadvantages in terms of invasiveness, the impossibility of its frequent use in routine practice, its inapplicability for assessing the dynamics of NAFLD during treatment, and relatively high cost. In this regard, work is underway to find new non-invasive methods for diagnosing NAFLD, especially in the early stages. Radiation diagnosis of NAFLD is based on the use of ultrasound (ultrasound), computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), the sensitivity and specificity of which vary considerably. Thus, this review summarizes and discusses modern methods of non-invasive diagnosis of different types of NAFLD in patients with T2DM that can potentially have an important prognostic value.