Remission of Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease After Radical Surgery in Patients with Colorectal Cancer: A Single-Center Retrospective Study

Abstract

Purpose:

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between remission of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and radical surgery for colorectal cancer (CRC) patients.

Methods:

From January 2014 to December 2021, data of patients with concurrent CRC and NAFLD who underwent radical surgery in a single-center hospital were retrospectively collected. NAFLD was defined as a mean computed tomography (CT) liver attenuation value of <40 Hounsfield units (HUs). Comparison of preoperative and 1-year postoperative CT images was performed to evaluate the change of NAFLD. Multivariate logistic regression analysis was performed to identify independent predictive factors for NAFLD remission. The Kaplan–Meier method was used to estimate overall survival (OS) and disease-free survival (DFS) between the remission group and no remission group.

Results:

In this study, a total of 55 eligible patients were included. The remission group had 33 (60.0%) patients and the no remission group had 22 (40.0%) patients. The mean preoperative weight was 66.1 ± 9.9 kg. The mean preoperative body mass index (BMI) was 25.4 ± 2.5 kg/m². We found that the average weight was significantly decreased (P < 0.01), average BMI was significantly decreased (P < 0.01), and HU score was significantly increased (P < 0.01). By comparing baseline characteristics between the remission group and no remission group, we found that the remission group exhibited larger tumor sizes (P = 0.036) than the no remission group. In the multivariate logistic regression analysis, we found that weight change was a predictor for NAFLD (odds ratio = 0.764, 95% confidence interval = 0.618–0.944, P = 0.013). We did not find any statistically significant differences in OS (P = 0.182) or DFS (P = 0.248) between the remission group and no remission group.

Conclusions:

The NAFLD remission rate reached 60.0% for CRC patients 1 year after radical surgery. In addition, we found that weight change was a predictor of NAFLD remission.