Bernard Bouscarel, Robert Nussbaum, Howard Dubner, Hans Fromm – 1 January 1995 – The uptake of ursodeoxycholic acid (UDCA) was studied in isolated hamster hepatocytes. The uptake was rapid and linear up to 60 seconds for each concentration studied. When the uptake rate was plotted against UDCA concentration, the curve was nonlinear, indicating both saturable and nonsaturable uptake mechanisms. The nonsaturable process had a diffusion constant of 0.01 nmol·s–1·g of cell·μmol/L–1.

Paolo Buonamico, Carlo Sabbá, Guadalupe Garcia‐Tsao, Elsa Berardi, Gianfranco Antonica, Giovanna Ferraioli, Jonathan E. Jensen, Emanuel Lerner, Kenneth J. W. Taylor, Ottavio Albano, Roberto J. Groszmann – 1 January 1995 – The effect of octreotide, a long‐acting synthetic analog of somatostatin, on fasting and postprandial splanchnic hemodynamics was investigated in cirrhotic patients.

Christian Madl, Georg Grimm, Peter Ferenci, Ludwig Kramer, Wafa Yeganehfar, Walter Oder, Rudolf Steininger, Christian Zauner, Klaus Ratheiser, Felix Stockenhuber, Kurt Lenz – 1 December 1994 – Sensory evoked potentials are markedly changed in patients with fulminant liver failure. It is unknown, however, whether serial recordings of sensory evoked potentials provide useful prognostic informations for patient management in fulminant liver failure.

Andrea E. Reid, T. Jake Liang – 1 December 1994

Joan Clària, Wladimiro Jiménez Ph.D., Josefa Ros, Montserrat Rigol, Paolo Angeli, Vicente Arroyo, Francisca Rivera, Joan Rodés – 1 December 1994 – To assess whether aortic vessels of rats with cirrhosis and ascites possess an enhanced vascular response to endothelium‐derived, nitric oxide—dependent vasodilators, we performed relaxation studies in isolated aortic rings of 21 control rats and 24 rats with carbon tetrachloride—induced cirrhosis and ascites. We carried out studies after contracting the vessels with norepinephrine.

Fumio Nomura, Kunihiko Ohnishi, Hidetaka Terabayashi, Toshiaki Nakai, Kazumasa Isobe, Kazuhiro Takekoshi, Kunio Okuda – 1 December 1994 – Increased plasma ammonia levels in patients with advanced cirrhosis have been attributed to reduced conversion of enteric ammonia to urea by the diseased liver and to entry of enteric ammonia into systemic circulation by way of portal‐systemic shunts. Because single‐pass extraction is high for portal venous ammonia, reduction of portal blood supply to hepatocytes may have detrimental effects on the hepatic extraction of ammonia.

Judith A. Marlett, Kathryn B. Hosig, Nicholas W. Vollendorf, Fred L. Shinnick, Valerie S. Haack, Jon A. Story – 1 December 1994 – Nine normolipidemic young men consumed a constant diet for 2 mo into which oat bran was incorporated during the second month so that we might test the hypotheses that oats lower serum cholesterol concentrations by decreasing bile acid and fat absorption and increasing bile acid synthesis. Bile acid kinetics were determined by measuring the 13C enrichment of serum cholic and chenodeoxycholic acids.

1 December 1994

Harold O. Conn – 1 December 1994 – An inverse relation is known to link blood potassium with renal synthesis and the release of ammonia. Given the liability of hyperammonemia for precipitating hepatic encephalopathy (HE), 28 patients affected by stage I HE were equally divided into two groups and maintained up to their death at the highest (5.4–5.5 mEq/l) or the lowest (3.5–3.6 mEq/l) normokalemia levels.

Allan Cooper – 1 December 1994 – The atherogenic macromolecule lipoprotein(a) [Lp(a)] has resisted in vivo analyses partly because it is found in a limited number of experimental animals. Although transgenic mice expressing human apolipoprotein (a) [apo(a)] have previously been described, they failed to assemble Lp(a) particles because of the inability of human apo(a) to associate with mouse apolipoprotein B (apoB). We isolated a 90‐kilobase P1 phagemid containing the human apoB gene and with this DNA generated 13 lines of transgenic mice of which 11 expressed human apoB.