Ethical Dimensions in the Context of Lifestyle-Related Diseases: The Case of Hepatic Steatosis
Keywords:
non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, hepatic steatosis, ethics, lifestyle, health-risk behaviorAbstract
The rapid social, industrial, technological and cultural changes in recent decades and often harmful lifestyles have attracted the attention of new, interdisciplinary approaches with an emphasis on changes in health-risk behavior. In the last 30 years, liver diseases have been the focus of various clinical and interdisciplinary approaches, and the most common of these is non-alcoholic liver steatosis previously wellknown as non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), currently fatty liver disease associated with metabolic dysfunction. Gradually, important data have been accumulated on behavioral and genetic risk factors, hepatic or extrahepatic complications and appropriate treatment strategies. Despite all the progress achieved, the prevalence of the disease is continuously increasing, and even more, a series of ethical issues and moral challenges are raised both for the health system in general and for clinicians in particular. The study aims to configure a descriptive and synthetic picture of the topics of ethics applied to the biomedical space in the context of lifestyle-related conditions in order to identify ethical benchmarks regarding the provision of personalized medical care to the patient with steatosis liver disease.
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