What Is Hepatic Metabolism?

Liver metabolism, 1. Bile secretion of the liver: Hepatocytes can continuously produce bile acids and secrete bile. Bile can promote the digestion and absorption of fat in the small intestine during the digestion process. 2. Liver and sugar metabolism: After the monosaccharide is absorbed by the small intestinal mucosa, it reaches the liver from the portal vein, and is converted into glycogen in the liver and stored. Hepatic glycogen plays an important role in regulating blood glucose concentration to maintain its stability. When labor, hunger, and fever, blood sugar is consumed a lot, and liver cells can break down liver glycogen into glucose and enter the blood circulation.

Liver metabolism

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Liver metabolism, 1. Bile secretion of the liver: Hepatocytes can continuously produce bile acids and secrete bile. Bile can promote the digestion and absorption of fat in the small intestine during the digestion process. 2. Liver and sugar metabolism: After the monosaccharide is absorbed by the small intestinal mucosa, it reaches the liver from the portal vein, and is converted into glycogen in the liver and stored. Hepatic glycogen plays an important role in regulating blood glucose concentration to maintain its stability. When labor, hunger, and fever, blood sugar is consumed a lot, and liver cells can break down liver glycogen into glucose and enter the blood circulation.

Chinese name

Liver metabolism

Foreign name

hepatic metabolism

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Liver metabolism

Liver metabolism and common problems revealed

Therefore, blood sugar often changes when suffering from liver disease.

3. Liver and protein metabolism: The amino acids absorbed by the digestive tract perform protein synthesis, deamination, transamination, etc. in the liver, and the synthesized proteins enter the blood circulation for the needs of systemic organs and tissues. The liver metabolizes ammonia produced by amino acid metabolism into urea, which is excreted by the kidneys.

So in liver disease, plasma protein decreases and blood ammonia can increase.

4. Liver and fat metabolism: The liver is the hub of fat transport. A part of the fat after digestion and absorption enters the liver, and then it is converted into body fat and stored. The liver is also one of the main organs for the synthesis of fatty acids, cholesterol, and phospholipids in the body. Excess cholesterol is excreted with bile. Various components of blood lipids in the body are relatively constant.

Liver cells will automatically adjust, and when fat metabolism is disturbed, fat can accumulate in the liver to form "fatty liver".

5. Vitamin metabolism: The liver can store fat-soluble vitamins, 95% of the human body's vitamin A is stored in the liver, and the liver is stored with vitamins C, D, E, K, B1, B6, B12, nicotinic acid, and folic acid. And metabolic sites.

When liver dysfunction, the vitamins synthesized by other organs cannot be utilized by the liver, resulting in vitamin deficiency. That is why patients with liver disease need to supplement multivitamins.

6. Hormone metabolism: Under normal circumstances, various hormones in the blood maintain a certain content, and the excess is inactivated by liver treatment. When suffering from liver disease, estrogen inactivation disorders may occur, causing breast growth in men, irregular menstruation in women, and changes in sexual characteristics.

The occurrence of "liver palm" and "spider hemorrhoids" in patients with liver disease is caused by the expansion of small arteries due to excessive secretion of estrogen.

7. Detoxification function: During the metabolism of the body, the portal vein collects blood flowing from the abdominal cavity, and harmful substances and microbial antigenic substances in the blood will be detoxified and removed in the liver.

Doctors have repeatedly emphasized that patients with chronic hepatitis B should not drink alcohol because the methanol and ethanol in alcohol have a direct destructive effect on the liver, and the detoxification function of the liver has weakened and is easily violated.

8. Defensive function: The liver is the largest reticular endothelial cell phagocytosis system. The hepatic sinusoidal endothelial layer contains a large number of Kupffer cells and has a strong phagocytosis ability, which can engulf foreign bodies, bacteria, dyes and other particulate matter in the blood.

Patients with liver disease have low immunity, and it is difficult to resist the invasion of external pathogens, and the human body is easily poisoned or infected. Symptoms such as flu and fever can make liver disease easily worsen repeatedly.

9. Regulate blood circulation: In normal cases, a certain amount of blood can be stored in the intrahepatic sinus. When the body loses blood, more blood is discharged from the intrahepatic sinus to compensate for the lack of circulating blood volume. Making clotting factors: The liver is the main place for many clotting factors in the human body. The 12 clotting factors in the human body, the most important of which are fibrinogen and prothrombin, are synthesized in the liver.

10. Heat generation: The regulation of water and electrolyte balance involves the liver. The liver's strong regenerative capacity does not show significant physiological disturbances when the liver is resected 70-80%. And the residual liver can grow to its original size within 3 to 8 weeks.

Lipids include fats and lipids (phospholipids, glycolipids, cholesterol and cholesterol esters, etc.). The liver is like a chemical factory. The digestion, absorption, transportation, catabolism, and anabolic metabolism of lipids are all closely related to the liver.
Serum lipids include cholesterol, cholesterol esters, phospholipids, triglycerides, and free fatty acids. The liver plays an important role in them. When liver cells are damaged, fat metabolism is abnormal. Therefore, the determination of changes in plasma lipoproteins and lipid components, especially cholesterol esters, is an important means to evaluate the lipid metabolism of the liver.
Lipids in food are mainly in the form of chylomicrons (CM) after digestion and absorption. After the chylomicrons enter the liver cells, the action of liver lipase catalyzes the hydrolysis of the remaining triglycerides. Cholesterol esters (EC) are catalyzed by lipase to cholesterol (UC), or further converted into bile salts (BA). Cholesterol is excreted from the bile. Fatty acids produced by hydrolysis can also participate in the synthesis of triglycerides for the liver to produce new lipoproteins. Lipids are metabolized by lipoproteinase and lecithin cholesterol acyltransferase (LCAT). Almost all plasma lipoproteins are synthesized by the liver. In liver cells, lipids and proteins bind. Very low density lipoprotein and high density lipoprotein are secreted after being synthesized in the liver, and low density lipoprotein is a metabolite of very low density lipoprotein.
The liver has the function of synthesizing fatty acids. Acetyl-CoA carboxylase is a synthetic fat accelerating enzyme. This enzyme system requires the participation of acetyl-CoA, carbon dioxide, reduced coenzyme II (NADPH), and biotin. The fatty acid synthase system of the human cytoplasm is a multi-enzyme complex. The liver not only synthesizes fatty acids, but also undergoes beta oxidation of fatty acids.