Paulette Bioulac‐Sage, Françoise Parrot‐Roulaud, Jean Pierre Mazat, Thierry Lamireau, Michelle Coquet, Boris Sandler, Jean Louis Demarquez, Valérie Cormier, Arnold Munnich, Mireille Carré, Charles Balabaud – 1 October 1993 – Mitochondrial cytopathies are multisystemic disorders of extremely variable expression due to a deficiency in oxidative phosphorylation. Cases have recently been reported in which fatal liver failure with neonatal onset was the major clinical and biochemical syndrome.

Jackie L. Martin, J. Gerald Kenna, Brian M. Martin, David Thomassen, George F. Reed, Lance R. Pohl – 1 October 1993 – Clinical and laboratory evidence suggests that the fulminant liver failure sometimes associated with the inhalation anesthetic halothane may be an immunemediated toxicity. Most importantly, the vast majority of patients with a clinical diagnosis of halothane hepatitis have serum antibodies, which react with one or more specific liver microsomal proteins that have been covalently altered by the trifluoroacetyl chloride metabolite of halothane.

Hartmut Rieder, Thomas Armbrust, Karl‐Hermann Meyer zum Büschenfelde, Giuliano Ramadori – 1 October 1993 – Transforming growth factor‐βH1 is an important cytokine in the pathophysiology of liver fibrosis, stimulating the production of extracellular matrix. Whether this cytokine can also control the degradation of matrix proteins in liver cells has not been investigated.

1 October 1993

Betty L. Slagle, Yi‐Zhong Zhou, Walter Birchmeier, Kathleen A. Scorsone – 1 October 1993 – Frequent allele loss from chromosome 16q was recently described for human tumors of the breast, prostate gland and liver, indicating the possible presence of a tumor‐suppressor gene on that chromosome arm. In this study, the chromosome 16 allele status of 38 hepatocellular carcinomas in Chinese patients was determined with restriction‐fragmentlength polymorphism analysis.

James E. Norman, Gilbert W. Beebe, Jay H. Hoofnagle, Leonard B. Seeff – 1 October 1993 – The hypothesis that adult infection with the hepatitis B virus in the United States leads to a carrier state with a high risk of primary liver cancer was tested in two ways: (a) a cohort mortality study of U.S. Army veterans given yellow fever vaccine contaminated with hepatitis B virus in 1942 and controls and (b) a case‐control study comparing veterans with hepatocellular carcinoma in Veterans Affairs hospitals with matched controls with respect to receipt of contaminated vaccine in 1942.

Tadashi Terada, Tetsuji Kida, Yasuni Nakanuma – 1 October 1993 – We examined expression of α‐amylase isozymes (pancreatic and salivary), trypsin and pancreatic lipase on the epithelium of extrahepatic peribiliary glands immunohistochemically using 53 autopsied normal extrahepatic bile ducts. Three parts of the extrahepatic bile duct (common bile duct, intrapancreatic bile duct and bile duct at the ampulla of Vater) were examined in each case. Histologically, the extrahepatic bile duct harbored branched tubular glands (extrahepatic peribiliary glands).

Takeaki Suou, Sadako Yamada, Junko Kobayashi, Ushio Hoshino, Eiji Nishimuki, Hironaka Kawasaki – 1 October 1993 – To evaluate the mechanism of increased serum concentrations of the N‐terminal propeptide of type III procollagen and the 7S fragment of type IV collagen in acute liver injury, we serially measured serum levels of these substances after transcatheter arterial embolization in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma.

Bahri M. Bilir – 1 October 1993 – The developmental regulation of the α‐fetoprotein (AFP) gene in liver results in high‐level expression in the fetus, followed by dramatic transcriptional repression after birth. We have examined the mouse AFP gene for transcriptional control sequences that may be involved in its postnatal repression in liver.

Darius Moradpour, Jack R. Wands, Margherita Melegari – 1 October 1993