{
  "abstract": "Biliary atresia (BA) is not a new disease; its clinical symptoms and signs were first recognized as a distinct entity in 1891 by John Thompson, a physician in Edinburgh, Scotland. 1 Early surgical intervention was slower in arriving, and results were truly appalling, with perhaps a success rate in restoration of bile flow of <10%. Some optimism was achieved with the recognition that Morio Kasai’s approach of a more radical resection and a Roux loop portoenterostomy offered a technique for the most common pathological finding of an obliterated extrahepatic biliary tract to the level of the porta hepatis. However, it is worth noting that long-term success was only seen in three of the ten cases in his early series published in 1958, only one of which was actually by Kasai as the lead operator.2 There is only one other surgical option, liver transplantation, described only 4 years after Kasai’s paper by Starzl et al. in 1963.3 Nonetheless, it took a lot longer to become widespread when the introduction of ciclosporin A freed the surgeons from the hazards of acute rejection in the early 1980s.4",
  "authors": [
    {
      "affiliations": [
        "Paediatric Surgery, King's College Hospital, London, UK"
      ],
      "name": "Mark Davenport"
    }
  ],
  "title": "Preface to topic collection: biliary atresia",
  "uid": "2d980546-1665-5122-811a-d7b55453b0dd"
}