The pear-shaped gallbladder (lat. : vesica biliaris or cholecystis) is, with a length of about 10cm and a width of 4cm, a rather small organ in the human body, but it can cause severe pain in case of illness. The gallbladder lies protected in an indentation at the bottom of the liver in the upper right half of the abdominal cavity at about the level of the last rib.
The liver, stomach and duodenum are located in its immediate vicinity. The term bile for the gallbladder is not correct, since only the fluid contained in the gallbladder is called bile. However, the bile itself is not produced in the gallbladder, but in the liver, which releases the bile through many smaller bile ducts and one large bile duct into the gallbladder, where it is temporarily stored until it is needed.
This intermediate storage plays a role especially between meals, since the bile is needed to digest food and bile produced between meals can be accumulated and stored until the next meal. In this way, about 50ml of bile is available for each meal. In addition, water is removed from the bile in the bile so that the stored bile is more concentrated than the bile coming directly from the liver.
This concentration results in more bile acids and cholesterol being present in the same amount of bile. After a meal, the bile is released together with the pancreatic fluid through a common duct into the duodenum, the first part of the intestine directly following the stomach. There the bile serves to digest fats by breaking them down into small droplets of fat so that the fat-splitting enzymes can work well.
In addition, the bile can also transport waste products out of the body that cannot be removed via other organs such as the kidneys if they are not soluble in water or urine. These include, for example, degradation products of drugs or bilirubin, a degradation product of old blood cells, which gives the bile its yellowish-brownish color. Since the production of bile is a very energy-consuming process for the body, part of the bile is reabsorbed into the body in the last part of the small intestine and recycled so that the fluid does not always have to be completely re-produced.
