Effects of prolonged alcohol ingestion on the liver of the rat under conditions of controlled adequate dietary intake.

Abstract

For over a century clinicians and pathologists have recognized a relationship between over-indulgence in alcohol and the occurrence of cirrhosis, but attempts to demonstrate a direct hepatotoxic effect of ethyl alcohol or to produce alcoholic cirrhosis experimentally in animals have generally been unsuccessful. Moreover, as the result of recent studies on the hepatic effects of dietary deficiency, alcohol has been relegated to a secondary role in the pathogenesis of cirrhosis. Connor8 observed that long-standing fatty infiltration of the liver gave rise to cirrhosis, and suggested, largely by inference from studies in diabetes, that alcohol produced such infiltration by interfering with carbohydrate and fat metabolism in the parenchymal cells. However, he also recognized the importance of concomitant malnutrition as a factor in this process. Recently, emphasis has shifted from the possible cytoplasmic and metabolic effects of chronic alcoholism to the consequences of the dietary deficiencies often associated with it, and, on the basis of clinical and experimental evidence, fatty cirrhosis has come to be regarded as a manifestation of dietary