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World J Gastrointest Pathophysiol. May 12, 2020; 11(3): 57-63
Published online May 12, 2020. doi: 10.4291/wjgp.v11.i3.57
Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and Atherosclerosis at a crossroad: The overlap of a theory of change and bioinformatics
Guglielmo M Trovato
Guglielmo M Trovato, Department of Clinical and Experimental Medicine, the School of Medicine of the University of Catania, Catania 95125, Italy
Author contributions: Guglielmo M Trovato designed, wrote and edited this article.
Conflict-of-interest statement: Guglielmo M Trovato has nothing to disclose.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Guglielmo M Trovato, MD, Professor, Department of Clinical and Experimental Medicine, the School of Medicine of the University of Catania, Policlinico Città Universitaria, Via Santa Sofia 78, Catania 95125, Italy. guglielmotrovato@unict.it
Received: October 15, 2019
Peer-review started: October 15, 2019
First decision: December 4, 2019
Revised: February 3, 2020
Accepted: March 1, 2020
Article in press: March 1, 2020
Published online: May 12, 2020
Processing time: 209 Days and 11.1 Hours
Core Tip

Core tip: Atherosclerosis and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease straddle a communal epidemiology, underlying mechanism and a clinical syndrome with protean manifestations, touching every organ in the body. Current therapeutic evidence supports the recommendation of addressing changes toward healthier lifestyles, including diet and physical exercise, in atherosclerosis and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, even when defined only by non-invasive methodology. Pathway-based analysis are elucidating key molecular mechanisms underlying complex diseases addressing the joint effect and integrality as function unit of multiple genes, exploring large-scale “-omics” data. No element suggests, apart from naïve statistics, that one condition affects the other directly by any mechanism.