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©The Author(s) 2015. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Hepatol. May 28, 2015; 7(9): 1154-1156
Published online May 28, 2015. doi: 10.4254/wjh.v7.i9.1154
Published online May 28, 2015. doi: 10.4254/wjh.v7.i9.1154
Ethanol-induced hepatic autophagy: Friend or foe?
Nabil Eid, Yuko Ito, Yoshinori Otsuki, Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology, Division of Life Sciences, Osaka Medical College, Takatsuki, Osaka 569-8686, Japan
Author contributions: Eid N wrote the paper; Ito Y and Otsuki Y reviewed it.
Conflict-of-interest: The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Nabil Eid, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology, Division of Life Sciences, Osaka Medical College, 2-7 Daigaku-machi, Takatsuki, Osaka 569-8686, Japan. nabil@art.osaka-med.ac.jp
Telephone: +81-72-6831221 Fax: +81-72-6846511
Received: January 19, 2015
Peer-review started: January 20, 2015
First decision: February 7, 2015
Revised: February 14, 2015
Accepted: March 30, 2015
Article in press: April 2, 2015
Published online: May 28, 2015
Processing time: 120 Days and 23.6 Hours
Peer-review started: January 20, 2015
First decision: February 7, 2015
Revised: February 14, 2015
Accepted: March 30, 2015
Article in press: April 2, 2015
Published online: May 28, 2015
Processing time: 120 Days and 23.6 Hours
Core Tip
Core tip: This short editorial discusses the impact of ethanol-induced upregulation of cytoprotective bulk and selective autophagy as mitophagy or lipohagy on various types of liver cells. While ethanol-induced activation of autophagy in hepatocytes is generally prosurvival mechanism, upregulation of autophagy in non-hepatocytes as stellate cells may stimulate fibrogenesis and subsequently induce detrimental effects on the liver as a whole. The autophagic response of other non-hepatocytes as macrophages and endothelial cells is unknown yet and needs to be investigated as these cells play important roles in ethanol-induced hepatic steatosis and damage.