Search results for " NASH"

The Changing Epidemiology of Hepatocellular Carcinoma :  Experience of a Single Center

2019

Aims. To analyze the main etiological factors and some clinical features of patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) at diagnosis and to compare them with those we described ten years ago. Materials and Methods. We compared two groups of patients with HCC, Group 1 consisting of 132 patients (82 M, 50 F) diagnosed in the 2003–2008 period and Group 2 including 119 patients (82 M, 37 F) diagnosed in the 2013–2018 period. For all patients, age, sex, viral markers, alcohol consumption, serum alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) levels, and the main liver function parameters were recorded. The diagnosis of HCC was based on AASLD, EASL guidelines. The staging was classified according to the “Barcelona Clin…

Determining a healthy reference range and factors potentially influencing PRO-C3 – A biomarker of liver fibrosis

2021

Background & Aims Progressive fibrosis has been identified as the major predictor of mortality in patients with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). Several biomarkers are currently being evaluated for their ability to substitute the liver biopsy as the reference standard. Recent clinical studies in NAFLD/NASH patients support the utility of PRO-C3, a marker of type III collagen formation, as a marker for the degree of fibrosis, disease activity, and effect of treatment. Here we establish the healthy reference range, optimal sample handling conditions for both short- and long-term serum storage, and robustness for the PRO-C3 assay. Methods PRO-C3 was measured in 269 healthy volunteers…

Need for liver evaluation in polycystic ovary syndrome

2007

Medicine is changing and requires a more in-depth knowledge also in fields that were previously considered completely different and dedicated to other specialists. A good example of this general trend is the paper by Cerda et al. [1] that shows a high prevalence of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) in women with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS). The authors studied 41 young women with PCOS and found that 17 patients (41%) had NAFLD. In addition, 7 patients with NAFLD had increased aminotransferase levels raising the possibility of a transition to nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH). Other reports have shown similar data recently [2–5]. It is time therefore that doctors caring for pat…

Correlation between the single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) rs4374383 in MERTK gene with the risk of development and progression of liver disease

Programmed cell death 1 genetic variant and liver damage in nonalcoholic fatty liver disease

2023

Background and aims: Programmed cell death 1/programmed cell death-ligand 1 (PD-1/PDL-1) axis has been reported to modulate liver inflammation and progression to hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) in patients with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). Here, we examined whether the PDCD1 variation is associated with NAFLD severity in individuals with liver biopsy. Methods: We examined the impact of PDCD1 gene variants on HCC, as robust severe liver disease phenotype in UK Biobank participants. The strongest genetic association with the rs13023138 G>C variation was subsequently tested for association with liver damage in 2889 individuals who underwent liver biopsy for suspected nonalcoholi…

Identification of efficient equilibria in multiproduct trading with indivisibilities and non-monotonicity

2018

Abstract This paper focuses on multiproduct trading with indivisibilities and where a representative agent may have non-monotonic preferences. In this framework, the set of firms’ profits (which comes from efficient subgame perfect Nash equilibria) is the Pareto frontier of some projection of the core of the game. We show that under monotonicity efficient subgame perfect Nash equilibria are achieved by single offers and the equilibrium characterization is easy to obtain. When dealing with non-monotonic preferences the problem becomes more challenging. Then, we define a pair of primal–dual linear programming problems that fully identifies the core of the game. A set of modified versions of t…

Existence and Optimality of Nash Equilibria in Inventory Games

2005

Abstract This paper studies the stability and optimality of a distributed consensus protocol for n -player repeated non cooperative games under incomplete information. At each stage, the players choose binary strategies and incur in a payoff monotonically decreasing with the number of active players. The game is specialized to an inventory application, where fixed costs are shared among all retailers, interested in whether reordering or not from a common warehouse. The authors focus on Pareto optimality as a measure of coordination of reordering strategies, proving that there exists a unique Pareto optimal Nash equilibrium that verifies certain stability conditions.

Heterogeneous network games: Conflicting preferences

2013

Proceeding at: 2nd Annual UECE Lisbon Meeting: Game Theory and Applications, took place 2010, November, 4-6, in Lisbon (Portugal). The event Web site http://pascal.iseg.utl.pt/~uece/lisbonmeetings2010/ In many economic situations, a player pursues coordination or anti-coordination with her neighbors on a network, but she also has intrinsic preferences among the available options. We here introduce a model which allows to analyze this issue by means of a simple framework in which players endowed with an idiosyncratic identity interact on a social network through strategic complements or substitutes. We classify the possible types of Nash equilibria under complete information, finding two thr…

Noncooperative dynamic games for inventory applications: A consensus approach

2008

We focus on a finite horizon noncooperative dynamic game where the stage cost of a single player associated to a decision is a monotonically nonincreasing function of the total number of players making the same decision. For the single-stage version of the game, we characterize Nash equilibria and derive a consensus protocol that makes the players converge to the unique Pareto optimal Nash equilibrium. Such an equilibrium guarantees the interests of the players and is also social optimal in the set of Nash equilibria. For the multi-stage version of the game, we present an algorithm that converges to Nash equilibria, unfortunately not necessarily Pareto optimal. The algorithm returns a seque…

NASH EQUILIBRIA IN A MODEL OF MULTIPRODUCT PRICE COMPETITION: AN ASSIGNMENT PROBLEM

2003

We study the market interaction of a finite number of single-product firms and a representative buyer, where the buyer consumes bundles of these goods. The buyers' value function determines their willingness to pay for subsets of goods. We show that subgame perfect Nash-equilibrium outcomes are solutions of the linear relaxation of an integer programming assignment problem and that they always exits. The (subgame perfect) Nash-equilibrium price set is characterized by the Pareto frontier of the associated dual problem's projection on the firms' price vectors. We identify the Nash-equilibrium prices for monotonic buyers' value functions and, more importantly, we show that some central soluti…