Ferritin as a key risk factor for nonalcoholic fatty liver disease in children with obesity

• Main Authors: Cao, J. (Author), Dong, G. (Author), Fu, J. (Author), Huang, K. (Author), Wu, W. (Author), Xu, H. (Author), Ye, J. (Author), Zhang, J. (Author)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: John Wiley and Sons Inc 2021
• Subjects: adolescent; Adolescent; alanine aminotransferase; alanine aminotransferase blood level; Alanine Transaminase; Article; biological marker; Biomarkers; blood; body mass; Body Mass Index; child; Child; childhood obesity; children; complication; controlled study; disease association; female; Female; ferritin; ferritin blood level; Ferritins; human; Humans; Logistic Models; major clinical study; male; Male; nonalcoholic fatty liver; nonalcoholic fatty liver disease; Non-alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease; obesity; pathogenesis; Pediatric Obesity; propensity score; propensity score matching; protein function; risk factor; sensitivity and specificity; statistical model
• Online Access: View Fulltext in Publisher
• ISBN: 08878013 (ISSN)
• DOI: 10.1002/jcla.23602

Background: The association between serum ferritin and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) in children with obesity is not clear. This study was designed to investigate whether serum ferritin can be an independent predictor for NAFLD. Methods: According to the hepatic ultrasound results, a total of 347 children with obesity were enrolled in this study. Among them, 95 patients with NAFLD and 95 without NAFLD were matched for gender, age, blood pressure and body mass index, the odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) for the association of ferritin and the risk of NAFLD were analyzed. Results: After propensity score matching, ferritin values of the patients with NAFLD were significantly higher than those without NAFLD group. Alanine aminotransferase and ferritin were strongly associated with NAFLD in multivariate stepwise logistic regression analysis. The medium and high levels of ferritin increased risk of NAFLD, and the adjusted ORs were 3.298 (95% CI:1.326-8.204), 7.322 (95% CI:2.725-19.574) across the ferritin concentration tertiles after adjustment for confounders. Ferritin was shown to be the best predictor for NAFLD with sensitivity and specificity of 60.0% and 77.9%, respectively, area under the curve was 0.733. Conclusion: The results show that serum ferritin can usefully be considered as a predictor of NAFLD in children with obesity. © 2020 The Authors. Journal of Clinical Laboratory Analysis published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.