Relationship between Physical Activity Level, Hepatic Steatosis Presence, Metabolic Syndrome and the Risk of Developing Type 2 Diabetes in Men

Cardiovascular disease, cancer, respiratory and metabolic disease represent 63% of all deaths worldwide and are considered the major causes of morbidity and mortality. Physical inactivity is considered a case of public health, and other behavioral and metabolic risk factors, according to WHO (2011), such as smoking, increased blood pressure, increased blood glucose, hypercholesterolemia, overweight and obesity. The Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD) is the most prevalent liver disease in adults, and can progress and be characterized as hepatic steatosis (HS) which is derived from the accumulation of lipids in hepatocytes, and histopathologic condition is more than 5% of the weight of liver. So, the purpose of this study is to identify the relationship between the physical activity level and the hepatic steatosis presence, metabolic syndrome and the risk of developing type 2 diabetes mellitus in men. We evaluated retrospectively medical records of 1399 men (40.7 ± 8.18 years old) who participated in the protocol of Preventive Health Check-up at Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein from January to October 2011. According to the results, it is concluded that there is a positive association between low physical activity level and the presence of Hepatic steatosis. The results further demonstrate that, despite the high BMI, blood levels of the subjects remained unchanged. Even without a positive association between these variables, the results showed a high risk behavior for the development of diabetes mellitus type 2.