Adipokines in nonalcoholic steatohepatitis

摘要

To the Editor: We read with interest the recent article by Lemoine et al. (1) in which they studied whether adiponectin (A) and leptin (L) were predictive of liver injury in patients with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease; the combination of HOMA with the A/L ratio may be a useful noninvasive approach to appreciate the severity of liver damage. We recently published our results on adipokines in 52 Mexican patients with biopsy-proven nonalcoholic stea-tohepatitis (NASH) (2). The aim of our study was to evaluate whether leptin and adiponectin levels were related to the degree of necroinflammatory activity and fibrosis in patients with NASH. Adiponectin showed lower values in Mexican patients with NASH as compared with controls (P = 0.02) (2), whereas in the Lemoine et al. study (1), no such difference was observed (P = NS) (1). In the study of Lemoine et al. (1), body mass index (BMI) and HOMA were correlated positively with leptin levels (r = 0.44 and 0.28 respectively) and negatively with the A/L ratio (r = 0.51 and 0.41 respectively) . In our study, necroinflammatory activity in liver biopsy correlated with adiponectin, gamma-glutamyltranspep-tidase, QUICKI and ferritin (P < 0.05) (2).