Foreword

Article Outline

• Copyright

The Journal of Hepatology supplement has become a fortunate tradition providing a high quality updated overview on liver diseases, therapy and management. This last edition represents a major effort of the Milan Editorial Office in an attempt to provide high quality, evidence-based updated information on what we think are the most challenging topics of modern hepatology. Our team of Associate Editors, as leading specialists in their own fields, gives us an excellent overview on the most important advances in hot areas of liver pathology worldwide. It is particularly rewarding that significant progress has been made in many fields and that basic research has largely become translational in nature, inasmuch as new concepts in liver disease management are now based on newly discovered basic pathogenetic mechanisms. The supplement focuses mostly on classical topics including cirrhosis and its complications, novel approaches to management of hepatocellular carcinoma, future treatment options of chronic hepatitis B, as well as fashionable topics of growing interest such as non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and classical ones such as iron, cholestasis and gallstones. The list has been deliberately limited to accommodate areas of major clinical relevance or those that needed appropriate updating.

Over the past year, we have seen a significant rise of the Journal of Hepatology impact factor and we feel that this is the result of a joint effort between the old and the new Editorial Offices in the quest for scientific quality. The review articles of the supplement contain invaluable information which provide an excellent reference point for the widest readership. The Journal has now become an excellent means of conveying experimental data useful in clinical practice and it is precisely with this aim that the editors decided to produce a distillate of these in “Management of Liver Diseases 2008”. We hope you like it.

Last but not least, we wish to acknowledge the financial support of EASL without which this supplement could never have been published.