Hepatic injury caused by ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) has been proposed as a key clinical problem associated with liver transplantation and major liver surgery.

Antibiotics are the single largest class of agents that cause idiosyncratic drug-induced liver injury (DILI), reports a new study in Gastroenterology, an official journal of the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) Institute.

The nonessential amino acid glycine has been shown to be anti-inflammatory in several animal injury models.

Alcoholic threshold effect rather than a dose-response effect on mortality from alcohol-related liver injury. Alcohol intake, rather than the type of alcoholic beverage, was more significant to liver injury.

Professor Yi-Yang Hu and his colleagues confirmed that Jianpi Huoxue decoction (JHD) reduced the cytokine expression induced by lipopolysaccharide (LPS) and inhibited some targets in LPS-activated Kupffer cell signal pathway. This may provide new insight on the mechanism of JHD on alcoholic liver injury.

Production of a protein that promotes inflammation appears to be linked to the higher incidence of liver cancer in men than in women, researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine have determined in mouse studies.

Researchers have identified the receptor pathway used by estrogen to decrease liver injury after trauma and hemorrhage. The related report by Hsieh et al, "G protein-coupled receptor 30-dependent protein kinase A pathway is critical in nongenomic effects of estrogen in attenuating liver injury after trauma-hemorrhage," appears in the April issue of The American Journal of Pathology and is accompanied by a commentary.

In studies in mouse models, researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine have found that a cellular receptor involved in triggering cell death is also a necessary component of tissue repair and regeneration immediately following liver injury. This discovery could have implications for early intervention or therapy in liver disease such as cirrhosis or hepatitis.