Clinical characteristics and the fasting serum DPP-4 activities of healthy individuals (CNTRL) and patients type with 2 diabetes mellitus (2TDM) and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD).

Mean values are indicated in bold letters and (95% Confidence Intervals are indicated in parenthesis).*All NAFLD patients, except 9 previously known diabetic individuals underwent a 75g CH OGTT:24 NAFLD patients were with normal glucose tolerance (NGT), 4 had either impaired fasting glucose levels or impaired glucose tolerance (“prediabetes”: IFG/IGT), and 11pateint from the NAFLD group were with type 2 diabetes mellitus (28%).All patients in the 2TDM group were with normal liver tests and normal liver US morphology (patients with such abnormalities were either excluded from the study or re-classified to the NAFLD group).In order to generate non-overlapping groups from the point of diabetes we also analyzed separately the DPP-4 activity in patients with NGT and NAFLD that was (33.08 U/L (95%CI:29.66–36.50) significantly higher in comparison with the 2TDM and also compared to the healthy control group. (see figure 1).In patients with NAFLD a non-invasive fibrosis score was used to assess the degree of intrahepatic fibrosis as suggested and validated by Angulo et al. (12) Results are as follows:No of pts without significant fibrosis (stage 0–2) (NAFLD fibrosis scoreIndeterminate (NAFLD fibrosis score−1.455–0.676): 6.No of pts with significant fibrosis (stage 3–4) (NAFLD fibrosis score>0.676): 4.**23 out of the 82 patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus were treated with insulin – in these cases the HOMA2-IR was calculated using the C-peptide levels.***Significant differences were found in certain lipid values using ANOVA with the Newman-Kleus post hoc range test in the 39 patients with NAFLD as follows: NAFLD patients also displayed higher triglyceride (TG) levels (2.41mmol/L, 95%CI:2.04–2.78) than in the CNTRL group (1.12mmol/L, 95%CI:0.65–1.58, p****The LDL-cholesterol was significantly elevated in NAFLD (3.41mmol/L, 95%CI: 3.05–3.77) compared to controls (2.66mol/L, 95%CI: 2.19–3.13, p = 0.012). The HDL cholesterol was significantly lower in both the T2D group (1.30mmol/L, 95%CI: 1.21–1.39, p*****Metabolic syndrome was both defined as proposed by the NCEP in ATP-III (indicated as NCEP in the table) and as recently suggested by the AHA and IDF the proportion in each study group was calculated using both methods respectively (14, 15).