The liver is the biggest and one of the most vital internal organs in human body, it performs over 500 essential functions. Hence, damaged liver could lead to the impairment of several important processes in our body.
Thus, it is important to know how the internal and external factors could affect our liver. As we can see, one of the most significant elements that affect the liver negatively is our drinking habit, especially drinking alcohol.
Keep on reading and discover the most common effects of alcohol on the liver.
Effects of alcohol on the liver
How the liver works
The liver is vital to our life due to its roles including processing healthful nutrients such as proteins, glucose, vitamins, and fats, producing bile to help our body to absorb fats and fat-soluble vitamins and eliminating toxins like alcohol, ammonia or drugs.
The essential processes the liver on how well-organized liver architecture is. That architecture could be divided into four building blocks: bile ducts, blood vessels, working liver tissue and supportive tissue.
If any block is damaged by any factor, it could lead to serious problems for our liver and the risk for our health.
How alcohol could affect the liver
Each time you drink alcohol, your liver filters that toxins from your blood and some of the liver cells die. Although your liver is very resilient and capable of developing new cells, excessive alcohol intake could result in a variety of problems to your liver that you do not know about until they become serious.
If the damaged cells surpass the new cells in your liver, it could not filter the toxins effectively. As a result, alcohol in your liver might convert into toxic chemicals that trigger inflammation which could lead to liver diseases:
Alcoholic fatty liver disease:
This is the first stage of alcohol-related liver disease and is attributed to a large amount of alcohol consumption, even for just a few days.
This is because of one of the effects of alcohol on the liver, which affects the way your liver processes fat and sends round the body to store. Finally, your liver cells would be stuffed full of fat.
If your liver gets fat, you may feel a discomfort in your abdomen, and then feel sick and lose your appetite. However, this disease can be reversible after stop drinking for two weeks.
Alcoholic hepatitis:
If it comes to hepatitis as one of the effects of alcohol on the liver, your liver is in a potentially severe condition that might lead to additional problems to your liver, even liver failure.
Until now, scientists are not entirely sure how the inflammation develop to become liver hepatitis, but they reckon that you might be at higher risk if you consume a great deal of alcohol over a long period.
The symptoms of this disease vary, depending on the damage levels you have to experience. You could encounter yellowing of the skin and eyes, losing weight or swelling in your abdomen. The mild case can be reversible if you stop drinking permanently.
However, if your liver is damaged seriously, your doctor could recommend a liver transplant provided that you promise would not drink alcohol again.
Alcoholic cirrhosis:
It is the most advanced form of effects of alcohol on the liver. Drinking too much alcohol in a long time leads to the fact that the liver cannot work as well as it did before. Hence, your body cannot produce enough proteins or filter toxins as it should.
As a result, the inflammation becomes extensive, causing scars on liver tissues. You might experience different symptoms in this stage of liver diseases like vomiting, losing appetite and weight or abdominal pain.
This stage of the alcoholic related liver disease is not reversible and could increase the risk for liver cancer. However, stop drinking immediately might help to prevent further damage and significantly increase your life expectancy.
It is never too late to stop drinking
There is currently no specific medical treatment for liver diseases. However, all of them would require stopping drinking or at least stick to the recommended limit by your doctor.
If you are dependent on alcohol, it seems to be difficult to stop drinking immediately. Therefore, if you want to cut down, the better way could be spreading your drinking out over the days a week. Then, you could notice the positive changes in your body.
Here is a video that demonstrates the effects of alcohol on the liver:
Final thoughts
Excessive alcohol consumption could exert negative impacts on your liver, so that you could experiences several discomforts, even risk your life. We hope that our article could give you a deeper understanding of effects of alcohol on the liver and change your attitude towards drinking habits.
To have a healthy liver and bring about other benefits to your body, you could keep yourself stay in control by stopping or reducing effectively consuming alcohol.
Besides our ideas, you could come up with other ideas for reducing the dependence on alcohol. We are looking forward to your shares to help all of us have a healthier life.