WEEKEND DRINKERS - CIRRHOSIS?

FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

Even the weekend drinker is not safe from cirrhosis of the liver, Dr. Marshall Orloff, professor and chairman of the department of surgery, University of California, San Diego, said recently.

Liver disease is now the ninth greatest cause of death for people in their early 50s in the United States, and deaths from this cause far exceed those from Kidney disease, Dr. Orloff said. Two New York researchers, he said, had demonstrated that alcohol is directly responsible for the destruction of liver cells, adding that alcohol assults the cells and continued assaults even on the weekend - destroy them.

"As surgeons we're treating the end result of the disease and the underlying disease, alcoholism, is untreated." Dr. Orloff said. "As surgeons and amateur psychiatrists we have 70 percent of our patients rehabilitated and back at work, and they haven't gone back to drinking."

Dr. Orloff said that although the liver has the ability to regenerate, a person could get along with one quarter of his liver function. "But the simple most important factor in recovery from cirrhosis of the liver is whether the person goes back to drinking or not."

Dr Orloff's team has been doing research for four and one half years on animals and is now ready to begin liver transplants in humans.

Dr. Thomas Starzi, a pioneer in transplantation, now has one child who has survived two years with her transplanted liver. She has a one-year survival rate of about 20 percent, Dr. Orloff said. There have been close to 100 liver transplants worldwide. One of the exciting aspects of liver transplantation, is the possibility of giving a patient another liver without removing his. This would invove replacing the spleen, which Dr. Orloff called, "completely expendable." or placing the other liver in the pelvic area.

Another possibility of providing a second liver is that it can be used to cure hemophilia (bleeders's disease). Dr Orloff said that he wouldn't undertake this kind of surgery now in a hemophiliac because the disease is not immediately fatal and it wouldn't be fair to subject a patient to such a traumatic experience.