Healthy Liver vs. Diseased Liver

Healthy Liver vs. Diseased Liver Travis Stork: But it is becoming more common in the general population. Jim Sears: That is right. A lot people do not even know what their liver is. It is essentially – it helps fight infection but it cleans the blood. It acts as a big filter. Most of the time your blood is pretty clean, pretty clear and it just kind of filters the blood, no big deal. Blood goes through the liver and it comes out nice and clean. But, if you got too many toxins in your blood, too much alcohol, too much acetaminophen or too much of any medication; the liver still is going to do its job because you can see, it is still coming through clear. But the liver has to work overtime and all those toxins will build up in the liver and can lead to a scarred liver, a fatty liver or a liver that is just really, really tired. Lisa Masterson: Like a stressor on the liver. Jim Sears: A big stress on the liver. Travis Stork: This amazing organ that sits right up here in your belly, it filters the blood. Well, this is a healthy liver, but what happens overtime is these tissues can become fibrotic. And as they become fibrotic, usually the liver gets much smaller. This one is actually not small yet, but if you look really closely, you can see these little fibers deposit and as the liver becomes more fibrotic, it leads to something call cirrhosis. By the time you get cirrhosis, your liver cannot filter any blood or very little blood and blood does not get through it and it backs up in your system and you develop so many secondary problems due to that. Andrew Ordon: And we saw that in that news piece.