Additionally, many systemic diseases have a liver component and sometimes it's hard to know what might have started a particular pathological condition. We will be studying examples of infectious, vascular, nutritional, obstructive, neoplastic and iatrogenic injury of the liver. It's going to be very important to know the micro architecture of the liver. Unfortunately, in the case of chronic and ongoing injury, complicated by loss of the basic reticular architecture, the impetus to restore substantially misses the mark. Additionally, the study of hepatitis is going to very important, but don't make the mistake of thinking that all cases of hepatitis are viral in nature, or for that matter have a microbiological etiology.
Many medications cause liver cell injury that can lead to overt hepatitis.
And, as I am sure everyone knows, ethanol has rather marked liver toxic properties. One of the leading causes of acute hepatitis is acute alcohol injury. We will see others as well. As with all of the laboratory units in this course, we are not able to look at examples of every disease of the an organ system. We don't have the time nor is it necessary.