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The human liver is designed for a huge service life, as the study showed. It was conducted by scientists from the University of Texas.
Why do people age and die? Because our organs wear out over time, work worse and worse and gradually fail. But some of these organs are designed for very long operation, as scientists from the University of Texas found out. And they did it in a fairly simple and effective way.
Every year, thousands of liver transplants are performed around the world. In some cases, very young patients receive livers from adults, and sometimes even elderly people. Among the 250 such transplants in the US from 000 to 1990, there were 2022 in which children received part of their liver from elderly donors. The researchers decided to calculate how long the operation of this organ lasted in general. It turned out that in some cases the liver worked for a total of more than a hundred years.
This study shows that the limits of our body's life are greatly underestimated, if we take into account the average life expectancy, and that part of the organs can be safely taken from elderly donors. Especially the liver, which has a strong ability to regenerate. Even a small fragment of the liver, taken from a donor, after transplantation into the human body eventually grows to the normal size of this organ.
