Therapy of congested liver | Congested liver

Therapy of congested liver

A congestive liver can only be treated by eliminating the triggering cause. In most cases there is no disease of the liver. The congested liver is caused by right heart failure.

It is therefore necessary to treat this right heart failure. Right heart failure also has various causes, all of which can/must be treated differently. This is the domain of cardiologists.

As a specialist in gastrointestinal and liver diseases, there is little the gastroenterologist can do in the case of a congested liver due to right heart strain. In rare cases, a congested liver is also caused by thromboses in the liver veins. In this case one speaks of the Budd- Chiari syndrome.

Patients need blood thinning (anticoagulation). If the congestion of the liver does not improve in this way, a portosystemic shunt (TIPS) can be considered, which channels blood past the liver. If the cause of a congested liver cannot be eliminated in time, it develops as a complication of cirrhosis of the liver. The complications of this disease must then also be treated.

Prognosis for congested liver

The prognosis of congested liver depends on the cause. It is important to be able to treat the cause and thus prevent progression into cirrhosis of the liver. However, this is often very difficult.

Therefore, the disease usually progresses further and cirrhosis of the liver develops. The prognosis of liver cirrhosis depends on the stage of the cirrhosis and the complications. Common complications are bleeding from varicose veins around the esophagus and stomach.

Here the mortality per bleeding event is almost 40%. The course of the disease depends on the cause. If the cause of the right heart strain can be well treated and the right heart pumps better again, the congestion of the liver also decreases and the disease improves.

In most cases, however, it is a chronic weakness of the right heart that is difficult to treat. In this case, the dreaded complication of cirrhosis of the liver develops over time, which often ends in death due to numerous complications. Patients with congested liver have a high risk of developing cirrhosis of the liver.

This is understood to be the remodelling of connective tissue with scarred shrinkage of the organ. This leads almost to a complete loss of function (liver failure). The process is not reversible (irreversible).Similar to years of chronic alcohol consumption, patients with liver cirrhosis have a high risk of complications due to congested liver, such as bleeding from varicose veins in the area of the esophagus (esophageal varices) or stomach (fundus varices). Therefore, in patients with congestive liver, every effort should be made to optimize cardiac performance to prevent the development of liver cirrhosis.

  • Is cirrhosis of the liver curable?
  • Esophageal Varices