Bob Alden, age 10, of Bessemer, Ala., for his question:
WHAT DOES YOUR LIVER DO?
Your liver, the largest glandular organ of the body, is a vital part of your anatomy. If your liver stopped functioning, you wouldn't be able to live more than eight to 24 hours.
Your liver is an extremely complicated organ that has many functions. Actually, the liver is a versatile chemical laboratory that performs hundreds of chemical alterations in body fluids.
The liver receives blood from the stomach and intestines through the portal vein. In the liver, this vein divides into a network of capillaries. As it passes through the liver, the blood is freed of its waste matter and poisons.
Liver cells also remove some sugar from the blood and change it into a kind of animal starch called glycogen. Liver cells store glycogen to be given out again as sugar when needed.
In addition, the liver stores vitamins and minerals. It also makes many blood proteins such as albumin, globulin and fibrinogen.
Another function of the liver is to manufacture bile. This thick, greenish or yellow fluid is poured into the small intestine, where it aids digestion.
One of the most important functions of the liver is to form urea, a nitrogen substance derived from proteins in the food. Digestion breaks down the protein substances in food and the bloodstream carries them to the liver. Here urea forms. The liver releases urea into the bloodstream, which carries it to the kidneys. The kidneys excrete the urea and it leaves the body in urine.
In man, the liver weighs from three to four pounds and is a soft, dark red or chocolate colored mass. The liver lies mainly on the right side of the abdominal cavity.
Five ligaments hold the liver in place. Grooves, or fissures, divide it into four lobes or sections.
Because the liver destroys various parasites and poisons brought into the body, it often becomes diseased itself. That is why persons who have suffered malaria, dysentery and other germ diseases, or have been poisoned by chemicals, may have liver diseases.
If the liver is damaged so that it does not excrete bile pigments into the small intestine, the bile pigments may then back up into the bloodstream and cause a type of jaundice.
Cirrhosis of the liver is another serious disease. In this condition, the connective tissue first thickens, then shrinks, causing the liver cells to waste away.
The whole liver may become hard, yellow, gritty, lumpy and shriveled with cirrhosis. Alcohol irritates liver tissue and one form of cirrhosis affects people who drink too much alcohol. The disease also may result from certain infections, from poisons, or from a diet that contains too much fat and not enough protein.
Infections of the liver often cause the organ to become abscessed. One of the most serious kinds of abscess is that resulting from amebic dysentery, a bowel infection.