Abstract
Hepatic encephalopathy (HE) and brain edema are serious central nervous complications of both acute and chronic liver failure. HE starts as a neuropsychiatric syndrome beginning with changes in personality and sleep disturbances progressing through cognitive dysfunction and motor symptoms to stupor and coma. In acute liver failure (ALF) progression may be very rapid, sometimes of the order of days (Butterworth and Vaquero, The liver; biology and pathobiology, pp. 600–617, 2009). Since the appearance of overt signs of encephalopathy in liver failure generally heralds a poor prognosis with a significant impact on clinical management options, on liver transplant outcome and on health-related quality of life, rational effective therapies are urgently required. Such therapies require knowledge of the precise mechanisms implicated in the pathogenesis of HE.
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This material is the result of work supported in part with resources and the use of facilities at the Central Texas Veterans Health Care System, Temple, Texas and from The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).
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DeMorrow, S., Butterworth, R. (2014). Hepatic Encephalopathy: A Primary Neurogliopathy. In: Parpura, V., Verkhratsky, A. (eds) Pathological Potential of Neuroglia. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0974-2_15
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