Prague, July 30 (CTK) – Every other Czech woman and 79 percent of Czech men have problems with liver, according to the results of tests conducted on 3,518 people all over the country in June within the National Health preventive programme, daily Pravo writes today.
The liver condition is affected by inflammatory diseases, hepatitis as well as exorbitant alcohol consumption, it adds.
The free monitoring dubbed “I Like My Liver” and organised by the Synlab Czech laboratory group has shown that “Czechs do not like their liver actually,” Pravo says.
“Women have reached better results than men for the first time in the history of the preventive programme. Over 50 percent of them had at least one monitored liver parameter above/below the standard level, while in the group of men it was 79 percent,” Zdenek Soudny, from Synlab, which organises a free screening of one organ or body condition every quarter, told Pravo.
Men’s bad results reflect their approach to lifestyle, unsuitable diet and mainly “their more positive relation to alcohol,” compared with women, said Tomas Hradek, head doctor of the Synlab biochemistry and haematology section.
The people whose blood analysis indicates liver problems need not always be ill, but they should take the result seriously and change their lifestyle, Pravo says.
“The results of the check-up at least point put that something is out of order. It is one of the last warnings saying if they do not start looking after their liver properly, even a slight deviation may develop into a fatally life-threatening condition,” Hradek added.
The Synlab laboratories examined the ALT and AST enzyme levels, which indicate liver damage by inflammation, the bilirubin level, higher concentrations of which indicate hepatitis, and for the first time also the GGT and CDT factors that reveal alcohol-related damage, Pravo says.
Men over 50 and women over 65 had bad results more often than other age groups, while women between 30 and 50 and men from 18 to 30 had most often good results, Pravo writes.
According to the Czech Statistical Office (CSU), some 1,500 people annually die of problems connected with alcohol consumption in the Czech Republic with the population of 10.5 million.
A crushing majority of them die of liver cirrhosis caused by excessive drinking. In 2014 alone, 1,324 people died of liver cirrhosis and 210 of alcohol poisoning, Pravo writes.
A nationwide survey shows that about one-third of men and less than 10 percent of women drink so much that it harms their health and almost 4 percent of men and only 0.3 percent of women need treatment because of a serious drinking-related health trouble.
However, according to data of the World Health Organisation (WHO), the total alcohol consumption, both of wine and beer, drops year-on-year in the Czech Republic as well as in the surrounding countries, Pravo writes.
hol/t
