Blanca Lizaola-Mayo, MD, on Changes in Nomenclature for Liver Diseases

Dr Lizaola-Mayo explains the recent changes in nomenclature from nonalcoholic fatty liver disease to steatotic liver disease and subtypes, and why these changes were implemented.

Blanca Lizaola-Mayo, MD, is a transplant hepatologist and the medical director of the Liver Transplant Center at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona.

TRANSCRIPT:

Hello, I'm Dr. Blanca Lizaola-Mayo. I am a transplant hepatologist at Mayo Clinic Arizona. I am the medical director at the Liver Transplant Center in Mayo Clinic Arizona, and I'm very excited to be here today to talk a little bit more about the new nomenclature from the formerly known as nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, or NAFLD.

So as we know, NAFLD or nonalcoholic fatty liver disease has been ingrained in our brains for many, many years. However, we recently are starting to understand that we needed to change this name and the reason for this is because there was a lot of stigma around the name alcohol and the word fatty. So by changing this to steatotic liver disease or SLD, we believe that we have been able to achieve this. The process has been long, and I want to give a lot of kudos to the big committee that was able to create this. It was a 3-year process where they utilized the Delphi process and nowadays we have the new nomenclature.

So as mentioned before, the nonalcoholic fatty liver disease is now known as steatotic liver disease. From here, we have subdivided different causes or reasons why we can have steatotic liver disease. Number 1, the metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease or MASLD. We also have created a new nomenclature for those patients that have metabolic-associated dysfunction and also alcohol component. This is known as MetALD or MALD, an increased alcohol intake. Number 3, we have a category where there's only solely alcohol-associated or alcohol-related liver disease. This is known as ALD. We also have a category that tries to encompass those patients that have specific etiologies that can cause steatotic liver disease, for example, monogenic diseases, drug-induced liver injury, or daily and miscellaneous. The last one is cryptogenic SLD or cryptogenic steatotic liver disease. Hope this is helpful for you. Thank you very much.