Risk Factor Prevalence and their Relative Influence on Fatty Liver and Gallstone Disease: A Cross-Ethnic Study Comparing Two High-Risk Populations from Chile and Northeast Germany.
Gallstone disease (GSD) is one of the most common gastroenterological disorders, affecting 10-20% of the population in Western countries and causing high costs in the health-care systems, e.g. in the USA about 6.5 billion Dollars annually. Fatty Liver Disease (FLD) is even more common reaching a prevalence of up to 45% in the general population4,5 and causing substantial health-care costs.
GSD and FLD are showing a rising prevalence since many decades.
The German data come from the baseline examination of the Study of Health in Pomerania (SHIP)20 that includes 4308 subjects. From the total population of Western Pomerania comprising 213,057 inhabitants in 1996, a two-stage stratified random cluster sample of adults aged 20-79 years was drawn. The net sample comprised 6265 eligible subjects. Of these, 4308 subjects (n=2192 women; response of 68.8%) participated in the SHIP baseline examination between 1997 and 2001. For prevalence estimates we used 4124 complete datasets.
Further, we estimated the prevalence of risk factors for FLD and GSD. To enable comparability between the two study groups, we performed median regressions adjusted by age and calculated marginal means at an age of 50 years. Median alcohol consumption was in general much lower in women than in men and considerably higher in the German compared to the Chilean population. BMI differed significantly only in women with Chilean having a 2.2 kg/m2 higher BMI than German women. The proportions of diabetes did not differ significantly.
Epidemiol Open J. 2016; 1(1): 40-52. doi: 10.17140/EPOJ-1-106
