When body’s processing plant breaks down
I was in the factory recently, looking at the heart, lungs, kidneys and liver on the inspection table in front of me, thinking about the damaged livers us vets see in our working lives.
If we look up “liver” on the internet, we are told that it is an organ peculiar to animals and humans that have a spine (vertebrates). Its usual location is on the right hand side just behind the ribs, shaped so it can fit snugly into position between the side wall on one side and stomachs and intestines on the other.
The internet will also tell you about functions this amazing organ carries out.
In truth, the liver is the processing plant of the body.
It has an unusual blood supply. All other organs and areas of the body have an arterial blood supply bringing oxygen into the organ and a venous route bringing the used blood away from that organ.
The liver has two blood supplies bringing blood in and one more bringing blood away.
When you think about it, this stands to reason.
The hepatic artery carries blood full of oxygen to the liver; the oxygen is needed for the working of the liver.
There is also a supply coming from the hepatic portal vein. This brings three quarters of the blood to the liver, from places like the intestines, pancreas, kidneys etc.
It is bringing all the goodies extracted from food that has passed through the intestines.
It also brings things from the kidneys that have been filtered out and need to be broken down further, so that they can be excreted from the body.
Hormones that also need to be broken down come from the pancreas and other glands.
The liver is vital for the carbohydrate, protein and fat metabolism of animals and humans.
It chemically breaks down the raw ingredients that are shipped into it and it uses the breakdown products as building blocks for amino acids for protein purposes, glucose for energy, and so on.
There is also vast storage facility in the liver. It stores quantities of iron for making blood cells, copper, vitamins and lots of other ingredients that are necessary for everyday life.
Sometimes we complicate the beautiful, smooth working of this factory, by asking it to handle awkward things like medication or alcohol.
These will make their way through the liver. Some medications will be broken down into ingredients that will be useful to cure a disease. Others, having been used, will be broken down into waste products. It is interesting to note that as the body ages, its ability to do all this work gets less, and it is easy to overload the liver even to toxic levels. That is the reason we cannot “handle” alcohol as well when we get older.
Imagine what an infestation of liver fluke is going to do to the functioning of the liver.
The infective stage of these fluke travel through the tissues of the liver causing untold damage before becoming adults in the bile ducts and producing fluke eggs. When I see a damaged, cirrhotic liver, with hard and thickened bile ducts, I often wonder how this liver continued to function. Maybe the animal concerned would have made it to factory weight sooner, with more profit for its owner. Seeing livers destroyed by abscesses is another day’s work...
