Understanding Liver Diseases – Hepatic Lobule (Nursing)

00:00 So let's loop back around to the opening question of this video series. Why are the lobules the the key to understanding liver disease? Why would we spend this much time breaking down the cells and the structure and the mononuclear phagocytic system? Here's why. I think you're going to be really excited to remind yourself of all you've learned in this video series.

00:23 So these lobules, they're the microscopic building blocks of the liver tissue. You have about 100,000 of them in your own liver. If these cells get damaged, they're just not going to function efficiently. So the types of things that damage them, we're talking about inflammation and fibrosis. Remember when we talked about the role of the MPS in both of those systems? Right. So if these cells get damaged, they're not going to function as efficiently and the liver provides like 500 processes for the rest of your body. Now let's talk about some specific issues or problems with damage to liver cells. Look on the left, you have normal lobules. See they're hexagonal shape. They're all neatly snugged together. Everything looks in perfect order. But if you look to the right, those are examples of liver cells that have fatty liver disease. Now they've kind of that yellowish color in between those cells, things aren't in order, they're not all touching. That's because fatty liver disease or another name for that is hepatic steatosis is excessive fat buildup right within the liver and it really can mess with the function of the lobules. So, this is why your patients, if they carry a lot of excess weight, are at an increased risk for fatty liver disease. Now, a 2nd problem like chronic liver disease is like cirrhosis. Now it's usually caused by alcohol abuse or hepatitis. So, this can be some big, long-term chronic health issues. So you have significant degeneration of the cells, you have inflammation, and you have fibrosis. So we keep using this word fibrosis or cirrhosis, it's scarring, and the cells are not able to function as efficiently as we need them to, to provide all the services that the liver does to the body. Now, both cirrhosis and FLD can also cause an increased risk of liver cancer. So that's something we take pretty seriously. If a patient is extremely overweight and they end up with fatty liver disease or they have some lifestyle issues with alcohol and they have cirrhosis or they've had hepatitis that has damaged their liver, they also have an additional increased risk of developing liver cancer.