A new study shows that parents who are physically young at a relatively young age may increase the risk of their children developing serious liver problems. Dr. Rohit Lumba of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and colleagues found that people whose fathers were obese before the age of 45 were more likely to have elevated levels of the enzyme alanine aminotransferase (ALT), which indicates liver complications, than those whose fathers were not. High levels of this enzyme may be associated with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, a condition associated with obesity, Lumba and his team said. In the Journal of Gastroenterology, the researchers note that one severe and advanced form of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease is steatohepatitis. To find out whether fathers’ obesity is associated with elevated levels of the enzyme Aalti as well as another enzyme linked to liver damage, aspartate aminotransferase (AST), the researchers examined measurements of the two enzymes in 1,732 male and female patients who participated in the Framingham Heart Study. The researchers found that the fact that one’s father became obese at a young age increased the odds of having high levels of ALT, regardless of personal weight, but it was not clear that there was a link between maternal obesity and high levels of ALT, nor did they find any relationship at all between fathers’ obesity. and enzyme levels (AST).