Editorial
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2016. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Hepatol. Feb 8, 2016; 8(4): 207-210
Published online Feb 8, 2016. doi: 10.4254/wjh.v8.i4.207
Inflammasome activation in decompensated liver cirrhosis
José M González-Navajas
José M González-Navajas, FISABIO Biomedical Research Foundation, Hospital General Universitario de Alicante, 03010 Alicante, Spain
José M González-Navajas, Networked Biomedical Research Center for Hepatic and Digestive Disease (CIBERehd), Instituto de Salud Carlos III, 28029 Madrid, Spain
Author contributions: González-Navajas JM solely contributed to this article.
Supported by Grant PI13/00315 from the Instituto de Salud Carlos III (co-financed by FEDER funds); and grants UGP-14-123 and UGP-14-248 from FISABIO Research Foundation.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The author declares 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: José M González-Navajas, PhD, FISABIO Biomedical Research Foundation, Hospital General Universitario de Alicante, Av. Pintor Baeza, 12, 03010 Alicante, Spain. gonzalez_josnav@gva.es
Telephone: +34-965-913928 Fax: +34-965-913922
Received: January 19, 2015
Peer-review started: January 20, 2015
First decision: March 6, 2015
Revised: November 2, 2015
Accepted: January 16, 2016
Article in press: January 19, 2016
Published online: February 8, 2016
Processing time: 372 Days and 0.4 Hours
Core Tip

Core tip: In this Editorial I discuss the involvement of the inflammasome in the inflammatory reactions that occur in patients with liver cirrhosis and ascites. I focus on a recent work in which we observed that the absent in melanoma 2 inflammasome is highly activated in the ascitic fluid of patients with advanced cirrhosis and that its activation is linked to the severity of liver disease. These findings are important for the understanding of the sterile inflammatory reactions in these patients, and could have important therapeutic implications.