LIVER TRANSPLANTATION
The liver is one of the most important organs in human body. It has very complicated multiple functions, but mainly related to digestion and metablism. Also, the liver collects the blood reflux of the veins from almost all abdominal organs. When various diseases dystroied the liver, the patient will have both vast metabolic disfunctions and obstruction of vain blood flow in the abdomen. There is almost no any other real substitute treatment for liver failure, except liver transplantation.
When liver failure occures, there are mainly three kinds of symptoms:
1. Metabolic disfunction, like malnutrition, weakness, encephalopathy, bleeding, etc.
2. The bilirubin and other wastes can not be excreted via the liver into intestine, the jaundice and encephalopathy will appear.
3. All blood flowing back to the heart through the liver from abdominal organs, is blocked; the high pressure in veins forced the water leaking into abdominal cavity. Then the ascites appears.
The only treatment for liver failure until now is liver transplantation. Liver transplantation is a far more complicated and difficult operation than the kidney transplant. The below shows how to rebuild the blood supplies and the bile duct of a transplanted liver. Because of the extremely high cost of the procedure, the cases of liver transplantation in China is very limited. I only performed three cases, including one multiple organ (including the liver, the pancreas and partial small intestine) transplantation. All successed in operation; one achieved long-term survival.
