Digestive disease week 2001. American association for the study of liver diseases. 19-23 May 2001, Atlanta, GA, USA

All aspects of hepatology were represented at this year's meeting of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD), although the meeting was dominated by a proliferation of information in the arena of viral hepatitis. In an international multicenter study of over 1000 treatment-naive patients with hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection, sustained virological response was found in 56% of patients who received PEGylated interferon (IFN) alpha-2a (Pegasys; F Hoffmann-La Roche) in combination with ribavirin (Virazole; ICN Pharmaceuticals), versus 45% in patients who received IFN alpha-2b and ribavirin therapy, and 30% of patients who received PEG. This is a significant improvement on currently licensed therapy and will define practice patterns for the next decade. In other areas, novel therapies such as silymarin for cholestatic liver disease, L-dT (Novirio Pharmaceuticals Inc), herbal therapy, combination therapies including amantadine and mycophenolate mofetil (Roche Holding) for viral hepatitis, and long-acting octreotide (Sandostatin LAR Depot; Novartis) for portal hypertension, were presented. This review represents the best of AASLD at DDW 2001.