1983 Volume 80 Issue 3 Pages 828-836
A nutritional survey was carried out in Tomié-Town, Goto Islands, Nagasaki Prefecture where the incidence of both liver cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma has been the highest in Japan.
Analysis on 143 inhabitants of Tomié-Town revealed that their daily intake of total calories, protein, fat, calcium, vitamin A, B1, B2 and C was lower than the averages of nutritional intake in whole Japanese population. Furthermore, constitution of their food was different from that of average Japanese population and was the nutritionally disproportional pattern.
When the results in these inhabitants were compared between patients with clinical and/or biochemical liver damage and healthy controls, or between hepatitis B antigen carriers and the others, low nutritional intake and abnormal food constitution correlated closely with liver diseases.
These results suggest that although it is not clear whether the undernutrition causes the high incidence of chronic liver diseases or chronic liver diseases are the cause of the undernutrition, nutritional intake is inadequate and unbalanced in the patients with chronic liver diseases even when they are spending normal life without any complaints.