3. Conclusions APAP is one of the most common antipyretic drugs that can be obtained without a prescription. It has been recommended as a safe medicine even for women during pregnancy and children. Nevertheless, recent studies showed many disadvantages of this drug including the most serious one – hepatotoxicity, whose pathogenesis is not fully understood. APAP overdosing may even lead to the need for liver transplantation. Investigators continu- ously search for new indicators of high specificity to APAP- induced liver damage and what can be used in a routine diagnosis. Current research gives a partial understanding of the molecular mechanism of the APAP-induced hepatotoxicity. Potential new biomarkers are proposed and the most promising are those derived from hepatocytes’ damage, such as, mRNA-122, HMGB-1 or a cleaved form of K-18. Although the described new potential biomarkers have not been applied in clinical practice yet,there is a possibility of using them in the future diagnostics. Nevertheless, there are some difficulties with comparing the specificity or sensitivity of the discussed biomarkers, due to their divergent time of appearing in biological samples. The most promising methods, that would help researchers find new biomarkers of liver damage caused by APAP, are recently developed ‘omics’ techniques.
