Cirrhosis is a condition that causes irreversible scarring of the liver. As scar tissue replaces normal tissue, blood flow through your liver is affected. Learn about the different causes, symptoms, and treatments for Cirrhosis in this video.
Contact your doctor for testing
Avoid heavy alcohol consumption
Avoid intravenous drug use
Practice safe sex
Get a Hepatitis B vaccine
Dr. Davis is one of San Francisco's finest house call specialist physicians and has been providing house calls and office visits to the Bay Area since 2005. His practice is built upon the philosophy that excellent customer service and excellent patient care go together. Dr. Davis works out of a charming 100-year-old Victorian home, and he believes that healing should begin when you walk in the door. While trained in modern medicine, Dr. Davis also has a deep appreciation of cultural anthropology, the natural sciences, and philosophy all of which he integrates with his medical practice. Dr. Davis received his MD from the University of Florida and completed his Family Practice residency at Lehigh Valley Family Practice. He has also lived, studied, and traveled abroad extensively, including for one year in Beijing, China, where he studied and practiced the principles of Traditional Chinese Medicine and Acupuncture.
JUSTIN C.K. DAVIS, M.D.: Hi. I'm Dr. Justin Davis and today I'm going to describe to you the condition known as cirrhosis. Cirrhosis describes a condition where the liver becomes irreversibly scarred and because of this stops functioning. Now, the liver, everyone's heard of the liver, but the liver is a very important organ in your body. It's important because most of the blood will flow through your liver and while it's flowing through the liver, it is being detoxified. The liver also produces a lot of different endocrine functions and produces a lot of essential vitamins and nutrients for the body as well as is responsible helping produce blood clotting agents and helping people to process sugar thereby not becoming diabetic. The most common causes to have this irreversible scarring of the liver, cirrhosis of the liver, is from chronic heavy alcohol consumption. The other most common cause is by a disease of the liver known as hepatitis. Typically, there are different kinds of hepatitis but hepatitis C is the most likely cause of cirrhosis. Symptoms of cirrhosis can be variable because the liver has so many functions but unfortunately you typically will not have many symptoms of cirrhosis until the liver is very badly damaged. Once it is very badly damaged, the cirrhosis is usually quite advanced and symptoms that you may have may be abnormal bleeding, pain where the liver is located which is in the right upper part of the abdomen, you may have swelling in the abdomen where you retain fluid which is a condition known as ascites or you may have sudden swelling in the legs. You may notice unusual bleeding either from the mouth or from the rectum. You may also notice dilated blood vessels around the body known as spider veins because they have a small spiderlike appearance. Most typically are found on the esophagus, this region of the neck or around the belly button. The liver is also very important for processing a breakdown product of the blood called bilirubin. When bilirubin is not processed correctly, it causes a yellow or what we call jaundiced appearance. So some signs can also be turning yellow in color of the skin or typically it begins with the eyes. Once you have cirrhosis, it's difficult to treat but it's very important to mange it. So it's essential if you've been told that you're having liver problems or that even you've developed cirrhosis that first of all you need to establish a very close relationship with a physician so he can do regular testing on you and make sure that the cirrhosis doesn't get any worse. Second, anything that you can do to prevent getting cirrhosis is very important and may prevent many other diseases. So, drinking a lot of alcohol is never good for you but it's not that occasional binge drinking that's going to cause cirrhosis but over a long period of time chronic heavy alcohol consumption and this should be avoided for many reasons but certainly to preserve your liver's function. Hepatitis C is a virus that a long time ago people got thru contamination of blood products, so if they had to receive a blood transfusion. Today, in America, we screen for this and so it's no longer such a concern. Probably the two most common reasons for getting hepatitis C are intravenous drug use and sex workers, are also more likely to acquire hepatitis C. So, these are things that can probably be avoided by most people. Hepatitis B is another kind of hepatitis that can cause liver cirrhosis but is less likely to, and in these days can be prevented because there's a vaccine for it. Everyone should probably be vaccinated for hepatitis B. If you do have cirrhosis or you're not sure if you have cirrhosis but have some of the symptoms that I had described, then it's very important to let a physician know right away even if it's not cirrhosis, there are other problems that the liver can have or other parts of the body that can cause some of the symptoms and usually all of these symptoms may signify an underlying disease process that should be treated right away by a physician.
