Every week I have to come up with story ideas for the radio show I help produce, Word of Mouth. Some weeks finding good ideas is easy, other weeks I can’t seem to find any good ideas/stories for the show. This was one of the bad weeks. However, in the process of looking for show-worthy stories, I occasionally find liver blog-worthy stories. Yesterday, in my desperate attempt to have something to present at our 3:00 meeting, I found this article from the Wolfram blog. (Yes, I occasionally look at math blogs. I’m a mystery.)
Can AstraZeneca Count on Your Liver? A Mathematical Modeling Approach to Monitoring Liver Function in Drug Trials
“In the US and Europe, up to 15 % of all acute liver failure cases are due to drug-induced liver injury, and the risk of injuring the liver is of major concern in testing new drug candidates. So in order to safely monitor the impact of a new drug candidate on the liver, researchers at the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca have recently published a method for evaluating liver function that combines magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and mathematical modeling—potentially allowing for early identification of any reduced liver function in humans.”
There’s a heck of a lot of math that I cannot comprehend in this article. But what I got out of it was this: they’ve found a new way to evaluate liver function using math which could prove to be very helpful to patients with liver disease in the future. Huzzah for math! And healthy livers.
Have you hugged your liver today?
The Derek Janiak Hepatobiliary Forum 
Yes, I mentally hug, big time, my 80+ year old liver more often than I care to admit. Hey, new subject, but related. I ask what are the Word of Mouth content guidelines as I would love to submit ideas to your producer. e.g. neighborhoods in NH, iterations of former NH mfg plants standing or long gone, NH towns whose name has changed and why, “101” city-state-fed hiking trails within ____ minutes of your address and an app on which you and your listeners might like to collaborate, plus ???
Well, you can submit them to me since I am one of the producers! Thanks for the suggestions! We typically avoid being New Hampshire-centric as we cover all manner of topics not just those that are of interest to New Hampshirites. Many of the ideas you mentioned do get covered by our beat reporters, so you’re definitely on the right track.