Comparative and Predictive Significance of Serum Leptin Levels in Non-alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease

Background Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) has emerged as the single most common chronic non-viral liver disease. The burden of the disease on healthcare-providing services has increased tremendously. Although a liver biopsy is the most authentic laboratory investigation for scoring the disease progression, it is an invasive technique. Researchers are vigorously working to find alternate markers for the scoring purpose. Despite the importance and association of leptin with metabolic syndrome and its related disorders, there have been relatively fewer studies on serum leptin and its association with NAFLD. Objective This study aimed to investigate variations in serum leptin levels between subjects with and without fibrosis in NAFLD and to assess the predictive value of serum leptin levels in NAFLD subjects. Materials and methods The study comprised 130 NAFLD subjects from two tertiary care hospitals in Lahore along with 86 healthy controls that were age, gender, and BMI matched with the subjects. Based on the NAFLD fibrosis score (NFS), the subjects were divided into two sub-groups, subjects with simple steatosis and those with fibrosis. Fasting serum leptin, glucose, and insulin levels were measured using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). The Kruskal-Wallis test was applied to find differences between the three groups and Fisher's exact test for categorical comparison. To assess the predictive value of serum leptin for steatosis and fibrosis in NAFLD subjects, receiver operation characteristic (ROC) curve analysis was implemented. Results The difference in serum leptin level was statistically highly significant (p-value