Category:Liver
From Hepatitis C Resource Centre
About the size of a deflated football and accounting for perhaps 2½ per cent of total body weight, it is located in the upper abdominal cavity, to the right of the stomach, beneath the lower right ribs. A healthy liver has a soft, solid texture and a smooth anterior surface. It is roughly triangular in shape and reddish brown in colour. At any given moment, the liver holds about a pint of blood - or 13 per cent of the total volume in the body.
Unlike any other organ, the liver has two sources of blood supply. The hepatic portal vein brings in purple-red, de-oxygenated, venous blood containing digested food. The hepatic artery conveys bright red, oxygenated, arterial blood.
All blood leaving the liver is collected in the hepatic veins, which join together into a single hepatic vein that empties into the lower vena cava. From here, blood is passed back to the right side of the heart, to be pumped to the lungs for re-oxygenation. And the cycle begins again.
All blood leaving the intestines returns to the heart only after passing through the liver where nutrients, food and other substances are filtered out for further processing.
The liver serves as the body’s internal chemical and power plant, performing hundreds of complex functions that are essential to life. Everything that we eat, drink, breathe, inject and absorb through the skin is processed through the liver.
Important things the liver does:
- It manufactures bile to help digest fats. Bile is stored in the gallbladder and released into the intestine as required. Without bile you waste away.
- It stores sugar and fats for energy.
- It stores other nutrients including vitamins and iron.
- It makes proteins needed in many body processes, including the repair of damaged tissues.
- It makes substances that help blood to clot, preventing excessive or life-threatening, bleeding.
- It manufactures, regulates and breaks down many hormones.
- It fights pathogens, including bacteria and viruses, that cause disease.
- It destroys poisons that we eat, drink, breathe, inject or otherwise absorb, including alcohol.
The liver can do all these things really well when it is healthy. It doesn’t do them as well if it is damaged. When the damage is extensive and irreversible (end-stage liver disease) it can hardly do them at al
