Aerobic exercise may curb non-alcoholic fatty liver disease in obese

A new study has found that doing aerobic exercise regularly may slow the progression of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease in obese people with pre-diabetes.

Walking on a treadmill for one hour a day appears to benefit these patients by increasing their metabolism and slowing the oxidative damage caused by the liver disease.

Researchers at the Cleveland Clinic looked at 15 obese people with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease who walked on a treadmill at 85% of their maximum heart rate for one hour a day for seven consecutive days.

They found that the exercise increased the participants' insulin sensitivity and improved the liver's polyunsaturated lipid index (PUI)-- believed to be a marker of liver health -- by 84%.

These improvements are linked to an increase in the hormone adiponectin, which plays a role in the body's response to insulin and has anti-inflammatory properties that help reduce the risk of heart attack, said Jacob M Haus, research fellow in the department of pathobiology at the Cleveland Clinic's Lerner Research Institute.

Obese people often have low levels of adiponectin.

"We were able to correlate changes in adiponectin with PUI and the body's resting energy metabolism. The latter gives us an indication of whether carbohydrate or fat is being metabolized. After exercise, the participants were burning more fat," said Haus.

"We like to think of exercise as medicine," he added.

Burning fat can help protect against oxidative damage and therefore the damage of fatty liver disease, he said.

The result was recently presented at the Experimental Biology 2011 in Washington, DC.