Excessive drinking can have damaging effects on your body. While drinking socially is pretty common, it’s important to understand when you’re drinking too much and how it can affect your overall health and liver function.
What’s considered excessive depends on factors such as:
- Age
- Weight
- Gender
- Overall health
While there’s no exact answer as to how much is too much, doctors generally recommend no more than two drinks per day.
Learn more about living donor liver donation.
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Alcohol and Liver Function
The liver is one of the most important organs in your body, performing different functions including:
- Processing blood
- Breaking down nutrients and chemicals in the blood
- Filtering waste
- Producing proteins for blood plasma
- Regulating blood clotting
Alcohol is filtered through the liver, but there is a limit to how much your liver can process. Having too much alcohol in your body makes it difficult for your liver to perform its necessary functions.
Drinking too much alcohol damages the liver, preventing or inhibiting it from doing its job.
Alcoholic Liver Disease
Consuming significant amounts of alcohol puts you at risk of developing different types of liver disease, including alcoholic liver disease.
The three stages of alcoholic liver disease are:
- Fatty liver disease: In this stage, extra fat builds up in the liver. This can be reversed when drinking is stopped.
- Alcoholic hepatitis: As liver damage progresses, liver tissue becomes inflamed. If left untreated and drinking continues, this stage can lead to permanent liver damage.
- Cirrhosis: In the final stage, scar tissue replaces healthy liver tissue — a condition that cannot be reversed.
Treatment for Liver Damage
When liver damage becomes permanent, treatment will be necessary. While there are medicines that can help treat underlying causes and prevent more damage, medicines cannot cure the disease or reverse the damage.
At this point, it is very important to stop drinking, maintain a healthy lifestyle and balanced diet, and continually monitor your health.
Liver Transplant as an Option
If liver failure, liver cancer, or a chronic diagnosis occurs, a transplant may be the only option. In most cases, liver transplants are performed using livers from deceased donors. However, another viable option is a living-donor liver transplant. Because of the liver’s unique ability to regenerate or regrow, someone can donate a portion of their healthy liver for transplant.
During a living-donor liver transplant, a surgeon removes part of the donor’s liver and transplants it into the recipient to replace the damaged liver. Living donation is a life-saving option that allows patients to spend less time waiting for a deceased-donor liver.
For many patients on the liver transplant waiting list, asking for help can be the most challenging part of finding a living donor. Be sure to talk to your family and friends about living donation.
Sources
http://www.upmc.com/Services/liver-cancer/liver/Pages/alcohol-liver.aspx
http://www.upmc.com/patients-visitors/education/behavioral-health/Pages/alcohol-facts.aspx
http://www.upmc.com/Services/liver-cancer/liver/Pages/function-liver.aspx
http://www.upmc.com/services/transplant/liver/living-donor/benefits-risks
About Transplant Services
For more than four decades, UPMC Transplant Services has been a leader in organ transplantation. Our clinicians have performed more than 20,000 organ transplant procedures, making UPMC one of the foremost organ transplant centers in the world. We are home to some of the world’s foremost transplant experts and take on some of the most challenging cases. Through research, we have developed new therapies that provide our patients better outcomes — so organ recipients can enjoy better health with fewer restrictions. Above all, we are committed to providing compassionate, complete care that can change – and save – our patients’ lives. Visit our website to find a provider near you.