Alcohol and liver

The monograph „ Alcohol and the liver“ of the author's collective J. Ehrmann Jr., P. Schneider, J. Ehrmann is intended for a wide readership, but especially for medical students and especially for postgraduate students in internal medicine, general medicine, gastroenterology, biochemistry and pathology. The authors (clinician-gastroenterologist, biochemist, pathologist) aim to provide a comprehensive, interdisciplinary view of alcoholic liver disease.

The structure of the work is usual, the introductory chapters are devoted to the chemistry of alcohol (including the production of alcoholic beverages) and the metabolism of alcohol in the human body and its excretion. In the following chapters, the methods of alcohol determination in biological material are described in detail and the pathobiochemistry of acute and chronic alcohol intoxication is discussed, including the relationship of alcohol to reactive radicals, iron and porphyrin metabolism, respectively. the relationship of alcohol to hemochromatosis and porphyria.
Furthermore, the publication is divided into chapters dealing with alcoholic steatosis, alcoholic hepatitis and alcoholic cirrhosis. The clinical picture including possible complications, differential diagnosis, laboratory findings and results of imaging methods are described in detail. Treatment options are outlined for all conditions. In this part of the monograph, special attention is paid to the description of characteristic morphological changes of the liver in alcoholism, especially to the description of microscopic (histopathological) findings in liver tissue samples obtained from fine needle biopsy. Morphological findings in complications of alcoholic liver disease, especially hepatocellular carcinoma, have also been described.

The importance of morphological findings for the diagnosis of alcoholic liver disease including differential diagnosis is discussed. Due to its importance in terms of differential diagnosis, a special chapter is devoted to non-alcoholic steatohepatitis syndrome (NASH/NAFLD). This chapter is again a comprehensive view of the clinician, biochemist and morphologist. The work is supplemented by a colour appendix consisting mainly of macroscopic and microscopic images of liver involvement, tables and graphs, and a list of recommended literature. There is no publication with a similar theme in the Czech language so far.