A national team of researchers led by scientists at Mayo Clinic has found that a common treatment for primary sclerosing cholangitis, a chronic liver disease, is not helpful for patients, according to a study published this month in the journal Hepatology.

New findings from nutrition researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis suggest that it's not whether body fat is stored in the belly that affects metabolic risk factors for diabetes, high blood triglycerides and cardiovascular disease, but whether it collects in the liver.Having too much liver fat is known as nonalcoholic fatty liver disease.

Researchers at INSERM (France) have engineered a chimeric protein that increases cell survival, migration and proliferation to improve stem cell engraftment. The results, which appear in the September 2009 issue of Experimental Biology and Medicine, show that TAT-Tpr-Met, a cell permeable form of the hepatocyte growth factor receptor can increase the number of hepatic stem cells integrated into the liver of the mouse.

A new study is the first to show that there is a previously unrecognized role for environmental pollution in liver disease in the general U.S. adult population. This work builds upon the groups' previous research demonstrating liver disease in highly-exposed chemical workers.

Long-term daily drinking, rather than weekly binge drinking, is by far the biggest risk factor in serious liver disease, according to a new report from the University of Southampton.

In the study published at the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, the researchers from Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center Bariatric Surgery Clinic found that the chronic intermittent hypoxia that often characterizes OSA, a common form of SDB, is also independently linked to the progression of liver disease.

Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have found that individuals who carry a specific form of the gene PNPLA3 have more fat in their livers and a greater risk of developing liver inflammation.

Taurine is a potent antioxidant with hepatoprotective effects. Organelle based changes in hepatocytes after taurine treatment in experimental liver fibrosis were searched systematically and organelle injury scores decreased were found to decrease significantly. Moreover, ultrastructural and histopathological scores in both groups were in strong correlation.

New research published in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons shows African Americans are more than twice as likely as Caucasians to die in the hospital after surgical removal of part of the liver -- an increasingly used procedure for the treatment of liver cancer.

Bethesda, MD (September 1, 2008) – Non-invasively measuring liver stiffness with transient elastography accurately diagnoses patients with late-stage liver disease, reports a new study in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, the official journal of the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) Institute.

Two new studies examine the use of the nucleoside polymerase inhibitor, R1626, to the standard therapy for hepatitis C. The reports appear in the August issue of Hepatology, a journal published by John Wiley & Sons on behalf of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD).

Gene-expression data from liver tissue or whole blood can be used to classify histopathologic differences in the effects of hepatotoxins. It is hoped that these findings, published in BioMed Central's open access journal, Genome Biology, will lead to a more precise way of defining the potential hepatotoxicity of new compounds.