These Proceedings are the fifth published from the meetings of the Italian Group for the Study of Liver Cirrhosis and Viral Hepatitis. The years of continuous collaboration has developed a maturity within the group, enabling great successes in experimental and clinical fields. The result is a better understanding of pathophysiological mechanisms, clinical course and its variations and different approaches in liver disease. Accurate experiments deepen our knowledge of pathogenic mechanisms of hepatic cellular damage in different conditions, the importance of various stimuli in determining mesenchymal cell proliferation, the mechanism of chronicity for viral infections and the therapeutic measures performed by clinicians and surgeons, in chronic liver disease. This results in the combination and comparison of the variety of results obtained by biologists and internists, clinical epidemiologists, surgeons and pathologists.

Excerpta medica international congress series.