Obesity and accumulation of subcutaneous adipose tissue are poor prognostic factors in patients with alcoholic liver cirrhosis

In alcoholic liver cirrhosis (LC) patients, obesity has become a problem that progresses into liver dysfunction. Herein, we investigated the relationship between the prognosis of steatohepatitis and body weight, along with fat accumulation in patients with alcoholic LC. We conducted a single-center retrospective study, enrolled 104 alcoholic LC patients without hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) based on histological and clinical evidence, and investigated factors related to poor prognosis using multivariate Cox regression and cluster analyses. Cox regression analysis revealed three independent relevant factors: subcutaneous adipose tissue (SAT) index (median 34.8 cm(2)/m(2), P = 0.009, hazard ratio [HR] 1.017, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.004–1.030), total bilirubin level (median 1.7 mg/dL, P = 0.003, HR 1.129, 95% CI 1.042–1.223), and prothrombin time value (median 64%, P = 0.007, HR 0.967, 95% CI 0.943–0.991). In the cluster analysis, we categorized the patients into three groups: no adipose tissue accumulation (NAT group), SAT prior accumulation (SAT group), and visceral adipose tissue prior accumulation (VAT group). The results of the three groups revealed that the SAT group displayed a significantly poor prognosis of the Kaplan–Meier curve (67.1 vs 21.2 vs 65.3, P<0.001) of a 5-year survival rate. Propensity score matching analysis of the SAT and VAT groups was performed to adjust the patient’s background, but no significant differences were found between them; however, the prognosis was poorer (21.2 vs 66.3, P<0.001), and hemostatic factors were still at a lower level in the SAT group. These findings suggest that SAT accumulation type of obesity is a poor prognostic factor in alcoholic LC patients without HCC, and the hemorrhagic tendency might worsen the poor prognosis in such cases.