Some Aspects of Nutritional and Toxic Liver Injury

Abstract

Based upon a Dissertation on “Hepatic Cirrhosis” given before the Society on Friday, 31st January 1958.

The problem of nutritional liver damage and cirrhosis has been made easier and at the same time more difficult as a result of animal experiments and attempts to apply them to man. The clinical syndromes of nutritional liver injury are best classified according to the method of Sherlock:

1. The Tropical and Subtropical Clinical Syndromes—The Kwashiorkor Syndrome.

2. Alcoholic Liver Injury.

3. Liver Injury caused by Protein Deficiency secondary to other disease.

The experiments carried out on rats in the field of nutritional liver damage are well known. For this reason, and also because their aetiological relationship to dietary liver injury in man seems to be limited, a brief resume of these will suffice.