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Copyright ©The Author(s) 2020. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastroenterol. May 7, 2020; 26(17): 1993-2011
Published online May 7, 2020. doi: 10.3748/wjg.v26.i17.1993
Metabolic inflammation as an instigator of fibrosis during non-alcoholic fatty liver disease
Angeliki Katsarou, Ioannis I Moustakas, Iryna Pyrina, Panagiotis Lembessis, Michael Koutsilieris, Antonios Chatzigeorgiou
Angeliki Katsarou, Ioannis I Moustakas, Panagiotis Lembessis, Michael Koutsilieris, Antonios Chatzigeorgiou, Department of Physiology, Medical School, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens 11527, Greece
Angeliki Katsarou, 251 Hellenic Airforce General Hospital, Athens 11525, Greece
Iryna Pyrina, Institute for Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine, University Hospital and Faculty of Medicine Carl Gustav Carus of TU Dresden, Dresden 01307, Germany
Antonios Chatzigeorgiou, Institute for Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine, University Hospital and Faculty of Medicine Carl Gustav Carus of TU Dresden, Dresden 01307, Germany.
Author contributions: Katsarou A and Moustakas II wrote the manuscript; Lembessis P and Pyrina I contributed to the writing of the manuscript and designed the figure; Koutsilieris M and Chatzigeorgiou A designed, edited and wrote the manuscript.
Supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, No. CH 1862/2-1 and No. CH 1862/3-1; the Hellenic Association for the Study of the Liver.
Conflict-of-interest statement: All the authors declare that they have no competing interests.
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: Antonios Chatzigeorgiou, BSc, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Physiology, Medical School, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Mikras Asias 75, Athens 11527, Greece. achatzig@med.uoa.gr
Received: January 20, 2020
Peer-review started: January 20, 2020
First decision: April 4, 2020
Revised: April 9, 2020
Accepted: April 21, 2020
Article in press: April 21, 2020
Published online: May 7, 2020
Processing time: 107 Days and 11.5 Hours
Core Tip

Core tip: Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is a frequent disorder in western countries with a wide range of histopathological findings, varying from simple steatosis to fibrosis or even cirrhosis. Metabolic dysregulation, principally during obesity, triggers chronic inflammation in the liver, defined as steatohepatitis that favors the development of fibrosis and likely cirrhosis and hepatocellular cancer. In this review we summarize and discuss the current literature regarding the principal inflammatory pathways involved in the pathogenesis of NAFLD and progression to non-alcoholic steatohepatitis.