The New Therapeutic Approaches in the Treatment of Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is the most prevalent chronic liver disease which is characterized by extremely complex pathogenetic mechanisms and multifactorial etiology. Some of the many pathophysiological mechanisms involved in the development of NAFLD include oxidative stress, impaired mitochondrial metabolism, inflammation, gut microbiota, and interaction between the brain-liver-axis and the regulation of hepatic lipid metabolism. The new therapeutic approaches in the treatment of NAFLD are targeting some of these milestones along the pathophysiological pathway and include drugs like agonists of peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors (PPARs), glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) agonists, sodium/glucose transport protein 2 (SGLT2) inhibitors, farnesoid X receptor (FXR) agonists, probiotics, and symbiotics. Further efforts in biomedical sciences should focus on the investigation of the relationship between the microbiome, liver metabolism, and response to inflammation, systemic consequences of metabolic syndrome.     

An improvement in the calculation of the magnetic field for an arbitrary geometry coil with rectangular cross section

Hong Lei, Lian‐Ze Wang and Zi‐Niu Wu presented new simple and convenient solutions of the magnetic field for an arbitrary geometry coil with rectangular cross section. They treated two types of basic forms: the trapezoidal prism segment and curved prism segment. The curved prism segment has been divided into a series of small trapezoidal prism segments with the same cross section and its magnetic field is a vector sum of the individual fields created by each small trapezoidal prism conductor. For one trapezoidal prism conductor the magnetic field is obtained by 1‐D integrals using Romberg numerical integration. In this paper, we give a completely analytical solution of these 1‐D integrals that considerably saves the computational time especially in the computation of the magnetic field nearby the conductor surface, at the conductor surface and inside the conductor. From obtained analytical expressions the treatment of singularities can be easily done. Also, we tested four types of numerical integration (Gaussian, Romberg, Simpson and Lobatto) to find the most convenient singularity treatment of 1‐D integrals. These obtained results are compared with those obtained analytically so that one can understand the advantage of the proposed approach. The paper points out on the accuracy and the computational cost. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.