What does your liver do? Besides taking toxins out of your blood, it has about 500 other jobs, including making bile that helps you digest food. Your liver takes what you eat and drink and turns it into energy and nutrients. It also plays a role in helping your blood clot.
It is a wedge-shaped organ, about the size of a football. Weighing around three pounds, it’s the body’s largest organ. It’s on the right side of the body, just under the rib cage. Liver function tests (“liver profile”) are blood tests that doctors use to check the liver for injury, disease, or infection.
Admirably, the liver is the only organ that can grow back when part of it is damaged or removed. That’s why people are able to donate parts of their livers. You don’t have to be related to someone to give them a part of your liver, although most donors are usually relatives or close friends.
Some people go on “cleanses” after binging on alcohol, i.e., limiting their diets to certain juices or foods, hoping to wash away toxins from their livers. There’s no scientific proof that these detox diets work.
The liver effectively breaks down the alcohol you drink to help get it out of your body. But drinking more alcohol than your liver can process may cause liver damage. There are several types of alcohol-related liver diseases including “fatty liver disease”, “alcoholic hepatitis”, and “alcoholic cirrhosis”.
Taking too much paracetamol (Crocin, Tylenol) can cause serious liver damage. Don’t forget that this medicine can be found in more than 600 formulations, including prescription drugs and over-the-counter pain, cold, and cough remedies.
Your skin and eyes can turn a yellow shade when there’s too much of something called bilirubin in your blood. “Bilirubin” is a yellow pigment your body makes when it breaks down red blood cells. Normally, the liver filters out bilirubin. But if you have too much of it or if you have liver damage, you can get “jaundice”.
Hepatitis A is one example of an illness that results in jaundice. Also, newborns often have jaundice because their livers are still developing, and they have trouble filtering the bilirubin.
Cirrhosis (scarring of the liver) is the most serious type of alcohol-related liver disease. Up to one in five heavy drinkers gets it. You can’t reverse liver damage from cirrhosis. But if you stop drinking, it can stop the disease from getting worse.
Drinking alcohol in moderation can help prevent liver problems. If you have a drinking problem, seek help to quit. There are other things you can do for your liver, too. Get to a healthy weight with exercise and a well-balanced diet. Also, consider getting tested to see if you have hepatitis C. It is suggested you get tested if you ever used intravenous drugs (as in addicts) or if you had a blood transfusion in the past. Ask your doctor if you should get vaccinated against hepatitis A and B, too.
Liver disease can be “silent” for a very long time. As many as half of the people who have it, don’t have any symptoms at all. If you do have warning signs, they’re often vague, such as feeling really tired and having achy muscles. You may also have itchy skin, swelling in your belly, dark urine, confusion, or yellowing of the eyes or skin. You’ll need to see a doctor for blood tests to find out for sure if your liver is the problem.
There is a vaccine for hepatitis A and B, but not for hepatitis C. In the United States, the hepatitis B vaccine is given to all babies and children, as well as most adults. It’s given as a series of three shots over six months.
There’s now alarming news that alcohol-related cirrhosis deaths are skyrocketing in young adults in the United States, says a study published in Michigan Medicine. This is also being observed slowly in India.
A recent multi-city survey, according to Press Trust of India, reveals that as many as 75 per cent youngsters in India, consume alcoholic drinks before turning 21, the legal age for drinking. The survey was conducted by the first year students of St Xavier’s College located in south Mumbai. Curiosity, peer pressure, easy accessibility, frequenting discos which provide music, entertainment and bars that operate well into the night, are some of the prominent factors that drive the youth towards alcohol and other addictions.
A rapid rise in liver deaths highlights new challenges in treatment and prevention despite gains in fighting hepatitis C, researchers say. Each alcohol-related death means decades of lost life, broken families and lost economic productivity. In addition, medical care of those dying from cirrhosis costs lakhs of rupees.
Jim Nabors, an American actor, singer, and comedian once wrote, “We live in an era of spare parts medicine. I had a liver transplant, then I had a pacemaker put in, then I had a new knee put in, then I had a heart valve put in. I’m almost brand new. I have a lot of new parts.” Obviously, he was a phlegmatic personality, philosophical about his destiny…
As for me, I prefer the advice (though I don’t follow it strictly) by an anonymous author: “Drink only water and surprise your liver.”
Is anybody listening?
(Dr Francisco Colaço is a seniormost consulting physician, pioneer of Echocardiography in Goa)
