Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease is increasing in prevalence. It can be subdivided into nonalcoholic fatty liver (NAFL) and nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH). Five to twenty percent of cases progress from NAFL to NASH. Increased hepatic Th17 cells and IL-17 expression were observed in NASH mice and patients, respectively. We analyzed CD4(+) effector T cells and regulatory T cells (Tregs) from...

We pose the problem of computing approximate Nash equilibria in bimatrix games with two simultaneous criteria of optimization: minimization of the incentives to deviate from a strategy profile and maximization of a measure of quality of the strategy profile. We consider two natural measures of quality: the maximum and the minimum of the payoffs of the two players. Maximizing the former yields p...

We formally incorporate the option to gather information into a game and thus endogenize the information structure. We ask whether models with exogenous information structures are robust with respect to this endogenization. Any Nash equilibrium of the game with information acquisition induces a Nash equilibrium in the corresponding game with an exogenous structure. We provide sufficient conditi...

Nash equilibria have been widely used in cognitive radio systems, sensor networks, defense networks and gene regulatory networks. Although solving Nash equilibria has been proved difficult in general, it is still desired to have algorithms for solving the Nash equilibria in various special cases. In this paper, we propose a compressed sensing based algorithm to solve Nash equilibria. Such compr...

Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is a major form of chronic liver disease in adults and children. It is one of the consequences of the current obesity epidemic, and can progress to nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), characterized by steatosis, inflammation, and progressive fibrosis, ultimately leading to cirrhosis and end-stage liver disease. The factors implicated in this progression...

This paper introduces a bottleneck game with finite sets of commuters and departing time slots as an extension of congestion games by Milchtaich (1996). After characterizing Nash equilibrium of the game, we provide sufficient conditions for which the equivalence between Nash and strong equilibria holds. Somewhat surprisingly, unlike in congestion games, a Nash equilibrium in pure strategies may...

Nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) is the most common liver disease in industrialized countries. NASH is a progressive disease that can lead to cirrhosis, cancer, and death, and there are currently no approved therapies. The development of NASH in animal models requires intact TLR9, but how the TLR9 pathway is activated in NASH is not clear. Our objectives in this study were to identify NASH-a...

Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease is the most common chronic liver disease, which can progress to nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH). Previous investigations demonstrated alterations in the expression and activity of hepatic drug transporters in NASH. Moreover, studies using rodent models of cholestasis suggest that compensatory changes in kidney transporter expression occur to facilitate renal...

BACKGROUND Ossabaw miniature swine when fed a diet high in fructose, saturated fat and cholesterol (NASH diet) develop metabolic syndrome and nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) characterized by liver injury and fibrosis. This study was conducted to further characterize the development of NASH in this large animal model. METHODS Ossabaw swine were fed standard chow (control group; n = 6) or N...

We examined 46 nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) and 52 hepatitis C virus (HCV) biopsy specimens to determine the magnitude of fibrosis heterogeneity and minimum length for accurate fibrosis staging. Three fibrosis scores were recorded: lowest regional, highest regional, and most common overall. Mean specimen lengths were 1.6 and 1.8 cm in NASH and HCV, respectively (P = .283). Mean (highest ...