Things to remember before and after liver transplant surgery

In today’s time liver transplant is very common surgery and in this process the damaged or injured liver is removed from body and at its place a new and healthy liver is replaced. For liver transplantation surgery a person needs a healthy liver from a donor, the transplantation is very common these days and many patients have benefited from this surgery and now they are living normal life.

People who have long term alcohol consumption habit and who are infected with hepatitis B & C virus, people having hereditary liver diseases, individuals having fat built up in liver are prone to cirrhosis which is the primary reason for transplant of liver. Cirrhosis actually destroys the liver cells and it begins creating the scar on liver. For liver transplant patient must not have other disease such as:
• Cancer except in the liver
• AIDS
• Severe heart and lung diseases
• Long term alcohol and drug consumption

For transplanting liver successfully you need to register the patients name in the organ sharing list. After this depending upon patient’s body, health status, blood group and many other health characteristics a hunt for the donor is made on. Most of the time the transplant is done by removing the healthy liver out of the person who just died and for that reason the demand is always more than supply. So if the doctor is advising for transplant then make sure you start finding the healthy donor ad this process is certainly not an easy one.

The patient needs to be very careful before and after the surgery. It is important to find a surgeon who has done successful liver surgeries in past. The successful the transplant is highly determined on how the doctor is performing the surgery and after that how patient’s body is reacting to it. After the surgery patients body is quite weak and it may not readily accept the new liver. This phenomenon after the liver transplant surgery is called as organ rejection. In this state body considers the new liver as some foreign organ and may even attack it. Doctors prescribe antibiotic medicines which the patients has to take forever in order to make the liver and other body organs work in conjunction. After the surgery patient must maintain healthy diet and stop consuming any sort of alcohol or addictive drugs as this will help him maintain the right functioning of the newly transplanted liver.