Meyhöfer S, Eckert AJ, Hummel M, et al. - Patients with type 2 diabetes (T2D) often have elevated liver enzymes which clearly correlate with a higher prevalence of clinically relevant comorbidities. Evaluating liver enzymes is recommended to be standard clinical routine in T2D because of a likely predictive role for comorbidities and complications.

• This study involved a total of 281,245 patients with T2D (aged 18-75 years), of whom 51,645 patients with complete data on demographics and liver enzymes were analyzed.

• In 40.2%, elevated liver enzymes were detected, however, only 8.6% of these patients were found to have International Classification of Diseases-10 codes for nonalcoholic fatty liver disease and/or nonalcoholic steatohepatitis.

• Patients with elevated liver enzymes had a higher prevalence of arterial hypertension, dyslipidemia, peripheral artery disease, myocardial infarction, coronary artery disease, microalbuminuria and chronic kidney disease than those with normal liver enzymes, post-adjusting for age, gender, diabetes duration, BMI and glycated hemoglobin.

• The lowest prevalence of elevated liver enzymes was evident in patients taking sodium-glucose cotransporter-2 (SGLT2) inhibitors or a combination of SGLT2 inhibitors and glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists.