Cirrhosis: Smoking is also bad for the liver

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When you smoke, you think of all sorts of harmful consequences: The blue haze is poison for the lungs, bad for the heart and causes the skin to age prematurely. However, it is far less known that smoking is also harmful to the liver. But the blue haze has a particularly devastating effect on people with liver disease. The German Liver Foundation warns of this on the occasion of World No Tobacco Day on May 31.

The liver is the body's central detoxification organ. It filters pollutants from the blood, including nicotine, that enters the body through tobacco consumption. With high cigarette, but also e-cigarette consumption, the nerve toxin becomes a considerable burden on the organ.

Millions of people with liver disease

Smoking is particularly harmful when the liver has already been attacked. In people with fatty liver, for example, smoking accelerates the progression of the disease, which can lead to life-threatening liver cirrhosis. This is especially true for people who have smoked at least one pack of cigarettes a day for more than ten years.

The German Liver Foundation advises all patients with liver disease to stop smoking. And there are still many of them: In Germany alone, more than ten million people suffer from fatty liver disease, around one million have developed cirrhosis of the liver, and an estimated 400,000 adults are infected with hepatitis B or C. Smoking is also particularly risky for hepatitis patients, as they are particularly likely to develop liver cell cancer.

The tricky thing about liver disease is that it often doesn't cause any symptoms for a long time. They therefore go unnoticed. Regular health checks with appropriate laboratory controls are therefore important in order to discover possible diseases of the organ at an early stage. This is especially true for smokers. According to the “Study on Adult Health in Germany” (DEGS1), this includes almost every third person in Germany.

Effective lifestyle change

Fortunately, the liver is a very regenerative organ: a fatty liver, for example, disappears completely within a few weeks through a corresponding lifestyle change. It is crucial to avoid everything that burdens the liver - including nicotine -, a healthy diet and exercise.

The situation is different with advanced liver diseases: cirrhosis of the liver, in which the organ shrinks and becomes nodular, is irreversible. Then it is important to protect and preserve the still healthy liver tissue as much as possible. In very severe cases, there is otherwise only a liver transplant as a last chance. (cf)

Source: German Liver Foundation on World No Tobacco Day: Smoking also damages the liver, press release German Liver Foundation, May 24, 2016

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