Can You Keep Donating and Regrowing Your Liver?
Fun Fact: people can donate over half of their liver, and the tissue will grow back within a year! Knowing that, it seems pretty logical to assume that we could just keep donating and regrowing...
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♩ Here at SciShow, we recently learned a fun fact: you can donate over half your liver to someone who needs a transplant, and the tissue will grow back within a year. So then we got super curious: could you just keep cutting chunks off, donating them, and regrowing your liver, kind of like donating blood, except it's an organ? Turns out, the answer is no. Which is kind of a bummer, because that would’ve been cool. But the reason why is really interesting — it’s because of how the liver cells get replaced. Liver regrowth in humans is pretty amazing. In a study of 27 living liver donors, it only took about a month after donation for their liver function to return to normal, and less than a year for their liver to regrow its normal mass. And ...
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♩ Here at SciShow, we recently learned a fun fact: you can donate over half your liver to someone who needs a transplant, and the tissue will grow back within a year. So then we got super curious: could you just keep cutting chunks off, donating them, and regrowing your liver, kind of like donating blood, except it's an organ? Turns out, the answer is no. Which is kind of a bummer, because that would’ve been cool. But the reason why is really interesting — it’s because of how the liver cells get replaced. Liver regrowth in humans is pretty amazing. In a study of 27 living liver donors, it only took about a month after donation for their liver function to return to normal, and less than a year for their liver to regrow its normal mass. And ...
