40 Fun Facts About The Liver

Which Titan of Greek myth was chained to a rock while an eagle ate his liver every day?

Prometheus was being punished by Zeus for stealing fire and giving it to humans; in several major versions of the myth the hero Heracles eventually kills the eagle and frees him.

Which Arctic animal's liver holds so much vitamin A that eating it can poison a person?

Polar bear liver has been off the menu for the Inuit for generations, and a Dutch crew learned why in 1597, falling severely ill after eating it while wintering on Novaya Zemlya.

After surgeons remove more than half of a healthy human liver, what does the remaining portion usually do?

It regrows to full size, or very nearly, with function back to normal in about six weeks, which is why a living donor can give away the larger share of the organ and recover.

For what purpose did Babylonian and Etruscan priests closely inspect the livers of sacrificed sheep?

Reading omens in a liver was called hepatoscopy, and a bronze model of a sheep's liver found near Piacenza, Italy, is inscribed with the names of Etruscan gods.

An overdose of which everyday painkiller is the most common cause of acute liver failure in the United States?

Acetaminophen, known as paracetamol outside North America, also prompts more calls to US poison control centers than an overdose of any other drug.

The liver is the heaviest internal organ, but which organ is the largest in the human body overall?

Skin accounts for roughly 16% of body mass, which pushes the liver, at about 1.5 kilograms, into second place among all the organs.

Which French delicacy is the liver of a duck or goose that has been enlarged by force-feeding?

Foie gras is protected under French law as part of the country's cultural and gastronomic heritage, and the force-feeding behind it dates back to Egypt around 2500 BC.

Which condition, named from the French word for yellow, discolors the whites of the eyes when the liver falters?

Jaundice shows that a yellow pigment from worn-out red blood cells is building up faster than the liver can clear it. It is common in newborns, affecting more than half in their first week.

In which part of the abdomen, just below the diaphragm and behind the lower ribs, does the human liver sit?

Upper right places the liver to the right of the stomach, and pain in that spot can signal that the organ is inflamed and stretching its outer capsule.

Which term, coined by the inventor of the stethoscope from a Greek color word, names late-stage scarring of the liver?

Cirrhosis was named by René Laennec, the French doctor who invented the stethoscope, after the Greek kirrhos, describing the yellowish color of a diseased liver.

Which medical specialty treats diseases of the liver, gallbladder, pancreas, and bile ducts?

Hepatology was long treated as a branch of gastroenterology, but the field has grown so fast that some countries now have doctors who specialize in it alone.

Which Scottish national dish mixes a sheep's heart, liver, and lungs with oatmeal, onion, and spices?

Haggis was traditionally boiled inside the animal's stomach, and it owes its national status to Robert Burns, who wrote a poem addressed to one in 1786.

Liver spots, the flat brown patches common on aging hands and faces, are actually caused by years of what?

Sun exposure, not the liver, is to blame: the spots were once wrongly put down to liver trouble and kept the name, though all they share with the organ is a brownish color.

Which mushroom, blamed for most fatal mushroom poisonings worldwide, kills mainly by destroying the liver?

The death cap may have killed the Roman emperor Claudius, and its main toxin hits the liver hardest because that is the first organ a poison reaches after leaving the gut.

Hepatitis A and hepatitis B can both be prevented by what, which still does not exist for hepatitis C?

A vaccine protects against hepatitis A and B, and the hepatitis B shot was the first able to prevent a cancer; hepatitis C has none, but tablets now cure over 95% of chronic cases.

Regular consumption of which everyday drink is linked by cancer research bodies to a lower risk of liver cancer?

Coffee may protect the liver whether or not it contains caffeine: regular drinking is tied to a lower risk of several other liver diseases too.

The insult lily-livered, first recorded in Shakespeare's plays, accuses a person of which failing?

Cowardice was once seen in the liver itself: a pale, bloodless one, white as a lily, was taken as the mark of a person without spirit, where a healthy liver is dark reddish-brown.

Which widely used drug does the liver convert first into toxic acetaldehyde and then into harmless acetate?

Alcohol leaves the bloodstream at a roughly constant rate, unlike most drugs, because a single standard drink is nearly enough to saturate the liver's capacity to process it.

The liver makes fibrinogen and prothrombin, two proteins that are essential to which life-saving process?

Clotting depends so heavily on the liver that a failing liver cannot make enough of these factors, which raises the risk of serious bleeding.

Which pigment, made when old red blood cells are broken down, does the liver remove from the blood?

Bilirubin does not go to waste: in the colon it is converted into the compounds that give feces their brown color and urine its straw-yellow tint.

In which form does the liver store spare glucose, holding roughly a hundred grams ready to release between meals?

Glycogen from the liver keeps blood sugar steady during a fast, feeding the nervous system above all, while the glycogen in muscles is kept for the muscles' own use.

The liver converts toxic ammonia from protein breakdown into which safer compound, later flushed out by the kidneys?

Urea leaves the liver in the bloodstream and is filtered out by the kidneys into urine; when a failing liver falls behind, ammonia builds up in the blood instead.

Which protein made by the liver is the most abundant in blood plasma, making up about half the total?

Albumin keeps fluid from leaking out of the blood vessels and carries hormones and many drugs around the body; doctors measure it as a cheap, easy check on how well the liver is working.

Which vessel delivers about three-quarters of the liver's blood, carrying it straight from the intestines and spleen?

The portal vein gives the liver first call on everything absorbed from the gut, nutrients and toxins alike, before that blood reaches the rest of the body.

What are the main working cells of the liver, which make up about 80 percent of its mass, called?

Hepatocytes handle most of the liver's chemistry, from making bile and blood proteins to storing sugar, and every lobule of the organ holds millions of them.

A shark's huge, oil-filled liver keeps it buoyant, doing the job of which organ found in most bony fish?

The swim bladder is a gas-filled sac that sharks lack; they rely instead on a liver full of light oil and on a skeleton of cartilage, about half as dense as bone.

A failing liver lets ammonia and other toxins build up in the blood, mainly disturbing which organ?

The brain suffers because ammonia the liver would normally clear reaches it instead, bringing confusion, personality changes and, at worst, coma. Doctors call the condition hepatic encephalopathy.

The liver and intestines make most of the body's supply of which waxy substance, vital to every cell membrane?

Cholesterol is largely home-made: about 80% of the body's daily production takes place in the liver and intestines, and the liver sends some of it out again in bile.

MASLD, the world's most common liver disorder, is defined by a build-up of what inside the liver's cells?

Fat in more than 5% of liver cells defines the condition, which usually causes no symptoms and is often found only by chance on a routine blood test or scan.

In Wilson's disease, the liver cannot shed which metal, which can leave brown rings around the cornea of the eye?

Copper normally leaves the body in bile, but in this inherited condition a faulty transport protein traps it in the liver, and the rings in the eye are deposits of the metal.

Hereditary hemochromatosis, once nicknamed bronze diabetes, overloads the liver and other organs with which metal?

Iron builds up because the gut absorbs too much of it from food, and the standard treatment is simply regular bloodletting, in amounts similar to a blood donation.

Which immune cells, named for the anatomist who spotted them in 1876, line the liver's blood channels and eat bacteria?

Kupffer cells are the body's largest population of resident macrophages, and they are the first immune cells to meet gut bacteria arriving in blood from the intestines.

Which American surgeon performed the first human liver transplant in 1963, at the University of Colorado?

Thomas Starzl needed four more years to achieve a successful liver transplant, in 1967, and is often called the father of modern transplantation.

Which American scientist shared the 1976 Nobel Prize in Medicine for identifying the hepatitis B virus?

Baruch Blumberg, known as Barry, later developed the test used to diagnose the infection, and in 1999 he became the first director of NASA's Astrobiology Institute.

Which term, from a Greek word for a wineskin, names the fluid that swells the abdomen in advanced liver scarring?

Ascites can run to litres of fluid, and treatment usually combines a low-salt diet, diuretic tablets and draining the abdomen.

Which toxin, produced by Aspergillus molds on badly stored corn and peanuts, is a potent cause of liver cancer?

Aflatoxin ranks among the most carcinogenic substances known, and children exposed to it also suffer stunted growth and weakened immunity.

Bile made in the liver travels down the common bile duct into which first section of the small intestine?

The duodenum is where bile meets food leaving the stomach; just before reaching it, the bile duct joins the duct from the pancreas at a junction called the ampulla of Vater.

ALT and AST, two markers on a standard liver blood test that rise with liver damage, are what kind of molecule?

Enzymes such as ALT and AST normally work inside liver cells, so high levels in the blood suggest that those cells have been injured and are leaking their contents.

Which fish's liver oil was spooned into generations of children to ward off the bone disease rickets?

Cod liver oil worked because it is rich in vitamin D, although scientists only traced rickets to a lack of that vitamin around 1920, about a century after the remedy caught on.

Hepatitis A differs from the blood-borne hepatitis B and C viruses in usually reaching a new host by which route?

Tainted food and water carry hepatitis A because the virus is shed in feces, which makes hand washing and properly cooked food simple, effective defenses.