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Joan Stephenson, PhD

JAMA. 2003;290:184.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Researchers from England, Scotland, and the United States have discovered that a retrovirus previously linked to breast cancer may cause primary biliary cirrhosis (PBC), a fatal liver disease marked by destruction of bile ducts within the liver. Their report appeared on June 23 in the on-line early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (www.pnas.org).

Healthy bile duct cells exposed to tissue from patients with primary biliary cirrhosis fluoresce green, indicating they contain a protein from a retrovirus that may trigger this fatal liver disease. © 2003. National Academy of Sciences, USA.

Besides finding evidence of viruslike particles in liver tissue from three patients with PBC (but not in liver tissue of four out of five patients with other liver diseases), the researchers found that liver samples from individuals with PBC contained gene sequences that closely resembled those of a mouse . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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