What to know

How Well Do You Know Your Liver?

The liver is very well a crucial organ in the human body

The liver might be the most underrated organ in the human body, and here’s why?

Ever since you’re a kid you learn that you should take care of your liver. But while you know that you shouldn’t drink to much or use medication with care, why is your liver so important?

First of all, it is important that you know what it is the liver does exactly. It is after all your largest internal organ (and second-largest behind the skin tissue). While most organs have limited functions, the liver plays an important role in almost every bodily process there is.

Stretched out a little to the right side under your rib cage, the liver’s main responsibility is to filter the blood coming from your digestive tract, before it returns to the rest of your body. In fact, it is the bloodiest of all organs and can hold as much as 10 percent of all your blood at any instance.

Besides being an organ (which have one specific function), it is also a gland, because after it filters toxins out of your blood it proceeds to expel them out of your body.

Other than those, its responsibilities include metabolizing drugs, creating specific protein that prevents blood clotting and the production of bile. And if this isn’t enough to prove the great importance of the liver, wait until you hear what’s next. It is the only human body organ that can completely regenerate. Yes, completely.

You only need 25% of your entire liver to regrow a new one, that is why liver transplants are relatively safe and easy.

Let’s say someone you know needs a liver transplant ASAP and you step up to help. First, doctors are gonna cut you up, remove up to half of your liver, and then stitch it into your friend’s body. Now your body won’t be the same with less of its liver intact, but guess what, it will grow back to its original size in just under two weeks. The same goes for the part you donated, which will grow into a full-size, functioning organ in the same period.

Now that you know more about the liver, it’s easy for you to understand how important it is. So make sure to better care of it from now on, and never be too afraid to give a piece up.

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