Intensive care of the patient with cirrhosis

Jody C. Olson, Julia A. Wendon, David J. Kramer, Vicente Arroyo, Rajiv Jalan, Guadalupe Garcia‐Tsao, Patrick S. Kamath – 24 August 2011 – Acute deterioration of patients with cirrhosis manifests as multiple organ failure requiring admission to an intensive care unit. Precipitating events may be viral hepatitis, typically in Asia, and drug or alcoholic hepatitis and variceal hemorrhage in the West. Patients with cirrhosis in the intensive care unit have a high mortality, and each admission is associated with a mean charge of US $116,200.

End‐stage liver disease candidates at the highest model for end‐stage liver disease scores have higher wait‐list mortality than status‐1A candidates

Pratima Sharma, Douglas E. Schaubel, Qi Gong, Mary Guidinger, Robert M. Merion – 24 August 2011 – Candidates with fulminant hepatic failure (Status‐1A) receive the highest priority for liver transplantation (LT) in the United States. However, no studies have compared wait‐list mortality risk among end‐stage liver disease (ESLD) candidates with high Model for End‐Stage Liver Disease (MELD) scores to those listed as Status‐1A.

Immunization with aspartate‐β‐hydroxylase–loaded dendritic cells produces antitumor effects in a rat model of intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma

Takehiro Noda, Masafumi Shimoda, Vivian Ortiz, Alphonse E. Sirica, Jack R. Wands – 24 August 2011 – Dendritic cells (DCs) capture and process proteins and present peptides on the cell surface in the context of major histocompatibility complex I and II molecules to induce antigen‐specific T cell immune responses.

Organ quality and quality of life after liver transplantation

Michael L. Volk, Michael Hagan – 24 August 2011 – Not only is there a limited supply of organs for liver transplantation, but the quality of the available organs is not uniform. Risk factors such as donor age and cause of death are known to predict graft failure, but their impact on the recipient's quality of life (QOL) has not been reported. We sent a QOL survey to 299 adults at our institution who had received a liver transplant 1 to 7 years before the study.

Early changes in interferon signaling define natural killer cell response and refractoriness to interferon‐based therapy of hepatitis C patients

Birgit Edlich, Golo Ahlenstiel, Aintzane Azpiroz Zabaleta, Jonathan Stoltzfus, Mazen Noureddin, Elisavet Serti, Jordan J. Feld, T. Jake Liang, Yaron Rotman, Barbara Rehermann – 24 August 2011 – Natural killer (NK) cells exhibit a polarized phenotype with increased cytotoxicity and decreased interferon gamma (IFN‐γ) production in chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection.

Dendritic cell regulation of carbon tetrachloride–induced murine liver fibrosis regression

Jingjing Jiao, David Sastre, Maria Isabel Fiel, Ursula E. Lee, Zahra Ghiassi‐Nejad, Florent Ginhoux, Eric Vivier, Scott L. Friedman, Miriam Merad, Costica Aloman – 24 August 2011 – Although hepatic fibrosis typically follows chronic inflammation, fibrosis will often regress after cessation of liver injury. In this study, we examined whether liver dendritic cells (DCs) play a role in liver fibrosis regression using carbon tetrachloride to induce liver injury. We examined DC dynamics during fibrosis regression and their capacity to modulate liver fibrosis regression upon cessation of injury.

Shedding of syndecan‐1 from human hepatocytes alters very low density lipoprotein clearance

Yiping Deng, Erin M. Foley, Jon C. Gonzales, Philip L. Gordts, Yulin Li, Jeffrey D. Esko – 24 August 2011 – We recently showed that the heparan sulfate proteoglycan syndecan‐1 mediates hepatic clearance of triglyceride‐rich lipoproteins in mice based on systemic deletion of syndecan‐1 and hepatocyte‐specific inactivation of sulfotransferases involved in heparan sulfate biosynthesis. Here, we show that syndecan‐1 expressed on primary human hepatocytes and Hep3B human hepatoma cells can mediate binding and uptake of very low density lipoprotein (VLDL).

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