Wednesday 2 July 2014

Liver Disease

Definition

Liver disease (also called hepatic disease) is a type of damage to or disease of the liver.


Liver problems include a wide range of diseases and conditions that can affect your liver. Your liver is an organ about the size of a football that sits just under your rib cage on the right side of your abdomen. Without your liver, you couldn't digest food and absorb nutrients, get rid of toxic substances from your body or stay alive.


Liver problems can be inherited, or liver problems can occur in response to viruses and chemicals. Some liver problems are temporary and go away on their own, while other liver problems can last for a long time and lead to serious complications.








Signs and symptoms of liver problems include:

Discolored skin and eyes that appear yellowish
Abdominal pain and swelling
Itchy skin that doesn't seem to go away
Dark urine color
Pale stool color
Bloody or tar-colored stool
Chronic fatigue
Nausea
Loss of appetite
When to see a doctor


Make an appointment with your doctor if you have any persistent signs or symptoms that worry you. Seek immediate medical attention if you have abdominal pain that is so severe that you can't stay still.




Causes

By Dr Sherazi

Problems that can occur in the liver include: 
Acute liver failure
Alcoholic hepatitis
Alpha-1-antitrypsin deficiency
Autoimmune hepatitis
Bile duct obstruction
Chronic liver failure
Cirrhosis
Enlarged liver
Gilbert's syndrome
Hemochromatosis
Hepatitis A
Hepatitis B
Hepatitis C
Hepatitis D
Hepatitis E
Liver adenoma
Liver cancer
Liver cyst
Liver hemangioma
Liver nodule (focal nodular hyperplasia)
Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease
Parasitic infection
Portal vein thrombosis
Primary biliary cirrhosis
Toxic hepatitis
Wilson's disease

Risk factors

by Dr Sherazi



Factors that may increase your risk of liver problems include:
A job that exposes you to other people's blood and body fluids
Blood transfusion before 1992
Body piercings
Certain herbs and supplements
Certain prescription medications
Diabetes
Heavy alcohol use
High levels of triglycerides in your blood
Injecting drugs using shared needles
Obesity
Tattoos
Unprotected sex
Working with chemicals or toxins without following safety precautions






















Liver Transplant


Liver transplantation or hepatic transplantation is the replacement of a diseased liver with some or all of a healthy liver from another person. The most commonly used technique is orthotopic transplantation, in which the native liver is removed and replaced by the donor organ in the same anatomic location as the original liver. Liver transplantation is a viable treatment option for end-stage liver disease and acute liver failure. Typically three surgeons and two anesthesiologists are involved, with up to four supporting nurses. The surgical procedure is very demanding and ranges from 4 to 18 hours depending on outcome. Numerousanastomoses and sutures, and many disconnections and reconnections of abdominal and hepatic tissue, must be made for the transplant to succeed, requiring an eligible recipient and a well-calibrated live or cadaveric donor match.

History


The first human liver transplant was performed in 1963 by a surgical team led by Dr. Thomas Starz of Denver, Colorado, United States. Dr. Starzl performed several additional transplants over the next few years before the first short-term success was achieved in 1967 with the first one-year survival post transplantation. Despite the development of viable surgical techniques, liver transplantation remained experimental through the 1970s, with one year patient survival in the vicinity of 25%. The introduction of cyclosporin by Sir Roy Calne, Professor of Surgery Cambridge, markedly improved patient outcomes, and the 1980s saw recognition of liver transplantation as a standard clinical treatment for both adult and pediatric patients with appropriate indications.[2] Liver transplantation is now performed at over one hundred centers in the US, as well as numerous centres in Europe and elsewhere. One-year patient survival is 80–85%, and outcomes continue to improve, although liver transplantation remains a formidable procedure with frequent complications. The supply of liver allografts from non-living donors is far short of the number of potential recipients, a reality that has spurred the development of living donor liver transplantation. The first altruistic living liver donation in Britain was performed in December 2012 in St James University Hospital Leeds.[3]
Indications


Liver transplantation is potentially applicable to any acute or chronic condition resulting in irreversible liver dysfunction, provided that the recipient does not have other conditions that will preclude a successful transplant. Uncontrolled metastatic cancer outside liver, active drug or alcohol abuse and active septic infections are absolute contraindications. While infection with HIV was once considered an absolute contraindication, this has been changing recently. Advanced age and serious heart, pulmonary or other disease may also prevent transplantation (relative contraindications). Most liver transplants are performed for chronic liver diseases that lead to irreversible scarring of the liver, or cirrhosis of the liver. Some centers use the Milan criteria to select patients with liver cancers for liver transplantation
Techniques


Before transplantation, liver-support therapy might be indicated (bridging-to-transplantation). Artificial liver support like liver dialysis or bioartificial liver support concepts are currently under preclinical and clinical evaluation. Virtually all liver transplants are done in an orthotopic fashion, that is, the native liver is removed and the new liver is placed in the same anatomic location. The transplant operation can be conceptualized as consisting of the hepatectomy (liver removal) phase, the anhepatic (no liver) phase, and the postimplantation phase. The operation is done through a large incision in the upper abdomen. The hepatectomy involves division of all ligamentous attachments to the liver, as well as the common bile duct, hepatic artery, hepatic vein and portal vein. Usually, the retrohepatic portion of the inferior vena cava is removed along with the liver, although an alternative technique preserves the recipient's vena cava ("piggyback" technique).


The donor's blood in the liver will be replaced by an ice-cold organ storage solution, such as UW (Viaspan) or HTK until the allograft liver is implanted. Implantation involves anastomoses (connections) of the inferior vena cava, portal vein, and hepatic artery. After blood flow is restored to the new liver, the biliary (bile duct) anastomosis is constructed, either to the recipient's own bile duct or to the small intestine. The surgery usually takes between five and six hours, but may be longer or shorter due to the difficulty of the operation and the experience of the surgeon.


The large majority of liver transplants use the entire liver from a non-living donor for the transplant, particularly for adult recipients. A major advance in pediatric liver transplantation was the development of reduced size liver transplantation, in which a portion of an adult liver is used for an infant or small child. Further developments in this area included split liver transplantation, in which one liver is used for transplants for two recipients, and living donor liver transplantation, in which a portion of a healthy person's liver is removed and used as the allograft. Living donor liver transplantation for pediatric recipients involves removal of approximately 20% of the liver (Couinaud segments 2 and 3).


Further advance in liver transplant involves only resection of the lobe of the liver involved in tumors and the tumor-free lobe remains within the recipient. This speeds up the recovery and the patient stay in the hospital quickly shortens to within 5–7 days.


Many major medical centers are now using radiofrequency ablation of the liver tumor as a bridge while awaiting for liver transplantation. This technique has not been used universally and further investigation is warranted.
Immunosuppressive management


Like most other allografts, a liver transplant will be rejected by the recipient unless immunosuppressive drugs are used. The immunosuppressive regimens for all solid organ transplants are fairly similar, and a variety of agents are now available. Most liver transplant recipients receive corticosteroids plus a calcineurin inhibitor such as tacrolimus orcyclosporin plus a purine antagonist such as mycophenolate mofetil. Clinical outcome is better with tacrolimus than with cyclosporin during the first year of liver transplantation.[4][5]If the patient has a co-morbidity such as active hepatitis B, high doses of hepatitis B immunoglubins are administrated in liver transplant patients.


Liver transplantation is unique in that the risk of chronic rejection also decreases over time, although the great majority of recipients need to take immunosuppressive medication for the rest of their lives. It is possible to be slowly taken off anti rejection medication but only in certain cases. It is theorized that the liver may play a yet-unknown role in the maturation of certain cells pertaining to the immune system[citation needed]. There is at least one study by Thomas E. Starzl's team at the University of Pittsburgh which consisted ofbone marrow biopsies taken from such patients which demonstrate genotypic chimerism in the bone marrow of liver transplant recipients.
Graft rejection


After a liver transplantation, there are three types of graft rejection that may occur. They include hyperacute rejection, acute rejection and chronic rejection. Hyperacute rejection is caused by preformed anti-donor antibodies. It is characterized by the binding of these antibodies to antigens on vascular endothelial cells. Complement activation is involved and the effect is usually profound. Hyperacute rejection happens within minutes to hours after the transplant procedure. Unlike hyperacute rejection, which is B cell mediated, acute rejection is mediated by T cells. It involves direct cytotoxicity and cytokine mediated pathways. Acute rejection is the most common and the primary target of immunosuppressive agents. Acute rejection is usually seen within days or weeks of the transplant. Chronic rejection is the presence of any sign and symptom of rejection after 1 year. The cause of chronic rejection is still unknown but an acute rejection is a strong predictor of chronic rejections. Liver rejection may happen anytime after the transplant. Lab findings of a liver rejection include abnormal AST, ALT, GGT and liver function values such as prothrombin time, ammonia level, bilirubin level, albumin concentration, and blood glucose. Physical findings include encephalopathy, jaundice, bruising and bleeding tendency. Other nonspecific presentation are malaise, anorexia, muscle ache, low fever, slight increase in white blood count and graft-site tenderness.
Results


Prognosis is quite good, but those with certain illnesses may differ.[6] There is no exact model to predict survival rates; those with transplant have a 58% chance of surviving 15 years.[7] Failure of the new liver occurs in 10% to 15% of all cases. These percentages are contributed to by many complications. Early graft failure is probably due to preexisting disease of the donated organ. Others include technical flaws during surgery such as revascularization that may lead to a nonfunctioning graft.
Living donor transplantation







Volume rendering image created with computed tomography, which can be used to evaluate the volume of the liver of a potential donor.


Living donor liver transplantation (LDLT) has emerged in recent decades as a critical surgical option for patients with end stage liver disease, such as cirrhosis and/or hepatocellular carcinoma often attributable to one or more of the following: long-term alcohol abuse, long-term untreated hepatitis C infection, long-term untreated hepatitis B infection. The concept of LDLT is based on (1) the remarkable regenerative capacities of the human liver and (2) the widespread shortage of cadaveric livers for patients awaiting transplant. In LDLT, a piece of healthy liver is surgically removed from a living person and transplanted into a recipient, immediately after the recipient’s diseased liver has been entirely removed.


Historically, LDLT began as a means for parents of children with severe liver disease to donate a portion of their healthy liver to replace their child's entire damaged liver. The first report of successful LDLT was by Dr. Christoph Broelsch at the University of Chicago Medical Center in November 1989, when two-year-old Alyssa Smith received a portion of her mother's liver.[8] Surgeons eventually realized that adult-to-adult LDLT was also possible, and now the practice is common in a few reputable medical institutes. It is considered more technically demanding than even standard, cadaveric donor liver transplantation, and also poses the ethical problems underlying the indication of a major surgical operation (hemihepatectomy or related procedure) on a healthy human being. In various case series, the risk of complications in the donor is around 10%, and very occasionally a second operation is needed. Common problems are biliary fistula, gastric stasis and infections; they are more common after removal of the right lobe of the liver. Death after LDLT has been reported at 0% (Japan), 0.3% (USA) and <1% (Europe), with risks likely to decrease further as surgeons gain more experience in this procedure.[9] Since the law was changed to permit altruistic non-directed living organ donations in the UK in 2006, the first altruistic living liver donation took place in Britain in December 2012. [10]


In a typical adult recipient LDLT, 55 to 70% of the liver (the right lobe) is removed from a healthy living donor. The donor's liver will regenerate approaching 100% function within 4–6 weeks, and will almost reach full volumetric size with recapitulation of the normal structure soon thereafter. It may be possible to remove up to 70% of the liver from a healthy living donor without harm in most cases. The transplanted portion will reach full function and the appropriate size in the recipient as well, although it will take longer than for the donor.[11]


Living donors are faced with risks and/or complications after the surgery. Blood clots and biliary problems have the possibility of arising in the donor post-op, but these issues are remedied fairly easily. Although death is a risk that a living donor must be willing to accept prior to the surgery, the mortality rate of living donors in the United States is low. The LDLT donor's immune system does diminish as a result of the liver regenerating, so certain foods which would normally cause an upset stomach could cause serious illness.








Garlic:


Garlic helps your liver activate enzymes that can flush out toxins. It also has a high amount of allicin and selenium, two natural compounds that aid in liver cleansingsays holistic nutritionist Hermeet Suri.


Grapefruit:


Eating or drinking grapefruit juice can help your liver flush out carcinogens and toxins. This fruit is also high in both vitamin C and antioxidant properties.


Beets:
Beets are high in plant-flavonoids, which can improve the overall functions of your liver.


Leafy Greens:

Leafy greens like spinach and lettuce have the ability to neutralize metals, chemicals and pesticides that may be in our foods, and act as a protective mechanism for the liver, Suri says.


Green Tea:


Green tea is full of plant antioxidants known as catechins, which have been known to improve the functions of our liver.


Avocados:

Adding more avocados to your diet can help your body produce a type of antioxidant called glutathione, which is needed for our livers to filter out harmful materials, Suri says.


Crucferous Vegetables:

Cruciferous veggies like broccoli and Brussels sprouts also increase the amount of glucosinolate (organic compounds) in our bodies that helps create enzyme production for digestion, Suri says.


Lemons:
We all know citrus fruits like lemons are full of vitamin C, but lemons also help our bodies cleanse out toxic materials and aid the digestion process.










         

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