Research
Mixed
Cholesterol-lowering therapy with atorvastatin completely prevents NAFLD-HCC development in high-cholesterol diet-fed mice by restoring gut microbiota dysbiosis.
For patients with fatty liver and high cholesterol, statin therapy may offer protection against liver cancer by normalizing gut bacteria. This suggests that managing cholesterol with statins might have benefits beyond cardiovascular health for liver cancer prevention.
GoodSupportsHIGH confidence
Moreover, atorvastatin restored cholesterol- induced gut microbiota dysbiosis and completely prevented NAFLD–HCC development.
Why this rating
Strong efficacy in animal models with clear mechanistic link to microbiota restoration.
Source
Dietary cholesterol drives fatty liver-associated liver cancer by modulating gut microbiota and metabolites
Xiang Zhang et al. · Gut · 2020
DOI 10.1136/gutjnl-2019-319664
mechanism_only · n=98Cited 843×
Read the paper DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10
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- Gut microbiota transplantation from high-cholesterol diet-fed mice to germ-free mice is sufficient to induce hepatic lipid accumulation, inflammation, and cell proliferation, demonstrating a causal role for microbiota in NAFLD-HCC.Strong
- High dietary cholesterol drives the sequential progression of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) to hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) by inducing gut microbiota dysbiosis and altering metabolites, specifically increasing taurocholic acid and decreasing 3-indolepropionic acid.Good
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