Better heart health linked to less fatty liver in Chinese adults
High versus low heart health scores were linked to over 90% lower odds of fatty liver disease and advanced liver scarring.
Limit: Fatty liver could change diet and activity, reversing the apparent direction of the association
Edited by Boris Djordjevic · AgingResearch.News
Researchers studied 17,077 Chinese adults from the China Kadoorie Biobank in a cross-sectional study. They examined metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease, a form of fatty liver disease. They assessed heart and blood vessel health using Life’s Essential 8, which averages eight component scores on a scale from 0 to 100. Scores of 80 to 100 counted as high; scores below 50 counted as low.
High scores were associated with lower odds of having fatty liver disease and, among people with the disease, advanced liver scarring. These associations were stronger among adults with higher genetic risk, which researchers estimated using genetic data. Adding a psychological health component to the health score produced similar findings.
Why it matters
Understanding how heart and liver health relate may inform research on maintaining metabolic health as people age.
Caveats
The cross-sectional design cannot establish whether better heart health reduced liver disease or scarring. The study included Chinese adults, so its applicability to other populations remains uncertain.
From the paper
- Participants
The cross-sectional study involved 17,077 participants attending the third resurvey in the China Kadoorie Biobank (CKB) with genotyping information and without cancer, cirrhosis, or viral hepatitis.
- Result
Compared with participants with low CVH, the ORs of MASLD were 0.29 (95% CI, 0.26 to 0.32) for moderate CVH (measured by LE8) and 0.07 (0.06 to 0.08) for high CVH, while the ORs of advanced fibrosis in MASLD were 0.21 (0.18 to 0.24) for moderate CVH and 0.04 (0.02 to 0.05) for high CVH.
Results, Associations of CVH with MASLD and advanced fibrosis in MASLD
Quoted word for word from the full text on PubMed Central.
- Metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease
- Life's Essential 8
- Advanced liver fibrosis
- Life's Crucial 9
- MASLD polygenic risk score
- Humans
The paper
Peking University
Health Data Science, Oct 19, 2026, Open access
