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Sleep, Good Nutrition and Exercise are the Mantras for a healthy child. 

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The Do’s and Don’ts of exercise for people who are 50 years and above. 

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How to maintain a healthy digestive system

You are what you eat! The food we eat affects our appearance and health. Here are some wonderful tips to maintain the health of your  stomach. 

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Liver Transplant

The liver is an important organ In the human body; it is wedge-shaped with 4 unequal lobes. It is the heaviest organ in our body and also is the largest gland. It is reddish in color and is situated on the right side of the abdomen. 

Functions of the Liver

1. Detoxifies chemicals and metabolizes medications.
2. Manufactures proteins which is important for clotting of blood, as well as for other functions.

3. Filters blood en route from the digestive tract, before it flows to the rest of the body.

4. The liver works in conjunction with parts of the pancreas, and the small intestines to digest, absorb and process food. 

Unique Quality of the Liver

The only organ in the body that can regenerate injured or lost tissue is the Liver. Therefore, when a piece of liver has been taken from a healthy, live donor, the liver in both the donor and the recipient will grow back to its normal size and both the live donor and the recipient will be able to lead a normal and healthy life. 

A donor can be healthy and living or the liver could come from a person who is brain dead because of a fatal accident or other reasons. 

With this foreknowledge in mind, let us examine why a liver transplant is necessary. 

No one can live without a liver that does not function properly. A transplantation would be recommended when a patient has liver failure or end-stage liver disease. 
When an organ in the body fails to function, it is always a life-threatening situation and liver failure can be caused by quite a few conditions:

• Cirrhosis of the liver is a chronic, end-stage disease that occurs when healthy tissue is replace by scarred tissue
• Acute Hepatic Necrosis occurs when the tissue in the liver, dies, possibly due to an acute infection, medications or due to toxins
• Biliary Atresia is a rare disease that affects newborns, when the liver and bile ducts are affected
• Viral Hepatitis is a very common cause in the form of Hepatitis B or C
• Metabolic Diseases a disorder that changes the chemical activity of the cells that are affected by the liver
• Primary Liver Cancers, where tumors originated in the liver
• Autoimmune Hepatitis occurs when the body’s auto immune system attacks the liver, and a swelling or redness develops

Procedure

The transplant surgery to replace the non-functioning liver takes between 6 to 12 hours. During the surgery the patient will have several tubes in their body. These tubes help the body to continue certain functions during and after the surgery, which could be for a few days, post-surgery. 

Post-Surgery

After the surgery, the stay in the hospital will be (for most patients) around 2 to 3 weeks, but some could be discharged earlier or retained, depending on their progress. On discharge the patient will have follow up visits so that the doctor can check on the functioning of the liver and it may take up until 6 months for a patient to feel fully healed. Normal activities and work may be resumed after a few months. 

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Heart Transplantation: Questions you always wanted to ask

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Heart Transplant is replacing a damaged or diseased heart with a healthy donor heart. It is not easy to find a donor heart. The donor should be brain dead but still on life support and the donor’s heart must match closely with the recipient’s tissue type or the body will reject it.

Why Heart Transplantation?

The following conditions of the heart may call for transplantation.
• Massive heart attack causing severe damage to the heart.
• Heart failure where medicines, alternate treatments and surgery is of no help.
• Abnormal heartbeats or rhythms that could be life threatening.

The Procedure:

The recipient is put into a deep sleep with general anesthesia and the breast bone is cut open for the procedure to be carried out.

• While the surgeon works on the heart, the blood is directed through a heart-lung bypass machine, which carries out the work of the heart and the lungs supplying the body with blood and oxygen.

• The diseased heart is replaced with the donor heart. The heart-lung machine is removed and the transplanted heart takes over its normal functioning of pumping the blood.

• Air, fluids and blood are drained out of the chest for several days, through tubes which are inserted in the chest allowing the lungs to re-expand fully.  

Who cannot take a Heart Transplant Surgery?

People who are malnourished, older than 65-70 years of age, HIV infected, stroke or Dementia patients, people with active infections such as Hepatitis, Insulin dependent Diabetes, malfunctioning of kidneys, lung, liver, nerves, pulmonary hypertension, smoking, alcohol or drug abuse are not eligible to take up this procedure.

Evaluation before the procedure:

Once it is decided to go for heart transplantation, the evaluation team will assess the candidate many times over several weeks or month which may involve blood tests and x-rays, skin check for infections, tests for kidney and liver, evaluation of heart such as EKG, echocardiogram and cardiac catheterization, tests for cancer, tissue and blood typing, ultrasound of neck and legs.

Follow up after the procedure:

The candidate should stay in the hospital for about 7 to 21 days after the surgical procedures. The first 48 hours will be spent in the ICU to monitor stability of the newly functional heart. The recovery period may last up to more than 3 months during which regular check-ups will be done.

The immune system in the body may consider the transplanted organ as a foreign body and may fight against the organ trying to reject it. Drugs to suppress body’s immune response are administered during this period. One can resume normal activities after 3 months. However rigorous physical activities should be avoided. Cardiac catheterization is done every year to ensure that no coronary disease develops later.

Prognosis:

It has been found that heart transplant prolongs life of people who would otherwise suffer premature death. The main concern of transplant is rejection, which if controlled can increase survival to more than 10 years.

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Functions and Diseases of the liver and how to keep it healthy

Liver is one of the largest organ of our body. It's situated inside your abdomen on the right side under the ribcage. It has numerous functions and one of the main function is that whatever you eat and drink, it helps to process that into various nutrients and energy. Another important function of the liver is to remove toxic substances from your body. 

Check out this video by Dr. V.S. Hemamala, Gastroenterologist, Liver specialist and liver transplant physician talk about the functions and diseases that affect the liver and important tips on how to take care of your liver. 

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