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Doctor Shows What Years Of Chronic Drinking Does To Your Liver

Doctor Shows What Years Of Chronic Drinking Does To Your Liver

The liver on the right suffered from cirrhosis, a late stage of scarring of the tissue which can result from chronic alcoholism

Stewart Perrie

Stewart Perrie

We all know that while drinking alcohol can lead to some of the funniest moments of our lives, doing it to excess can cause a fair amount of damage to our bodies.

The problem is that this damage is done over a period of decades and it's not until we're in our 50s and 60s that we start paying for the booze we steamed through in our glory days.

However, if you want to see what your liver could look like after too many years on the pints, have a look at this.

Audiences were shocked on US talk show Lifechangers when they were shown two different livers - a healthy specimen and another that suffered from cirrhosis, a late stage of scarring of the tissue which can result from chronic alcoholism.

Host Dr Drew Pinsky showed off the different organs while speaking to twin sisters in a bid to get them to cut down on their boozing.

He told them: "Essentially every woman I've treated who drinks like either of you do has some degree of alcoholic liver disease. I can't say that you have cirrhosis - not everybody gets cirrhosis, but I worry that you are at risk for cirrhosis."

In the video from 2011, the celebrity doctor explains that when your liver gets that bad, it's essentially useless at its job of removing toxins from your body. This then has a knock-on effect that can damage your immune system and end up leaving you with brain damage.

Now, if you wanted another comparable video to make you give up a different vice, have a look at this.

Nurse Amanda Eller from Western Carolina University has posted a comparison shot of what a healthy set of lungs look like versus ones that have been battered by a pack of cigarettes a day for 20 years.

The stills from the video should be enough to put anyone off as the sheer colour difference is pretty unsettling.

It seriously looks like the difference between Spider-Man and Venom.

Not only do we get a look at how much the lungs differ visually, but we also get told how the smoker's organ has changed over two decades of abuse. A voice on the video explains that the lung has cancer and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), as well as very little retentiveness to oxygen.

They use an instrument to blow up the lungs to illustrate their effectiveness and the voiceover explains that as a result of the cigarettes, when the air leaves the lungs, it does so rapidly because the organ can't hold onto it.

So if you ever needed a reason to give up the cigs or the booze - here you go.

Featured Image Credit: Dr Drew's Lifechangers/The CW

Topics: Cigarettes, Interesting, Alcohol, Body, Community, Drinking, Smoking, Health