Liver and Bones Facts You Didn't Know Until You Read This Post

Unlike other organs in our body, the liver is the only one that has the ability to regenerate at least to a reasonable percentage and its job is to detoxify the body and in doing so, it looks like it got the power to repair itself and also do so rapidly if there is a damage to it. The liver can regenerate itself even when it loses half of its size and this is spectacular compared to other parts of the body but is there a time when it loses its ability as a result of age since majority of our body stops growing at a particular age.

Using Hepatocytes found in the liver from people of ages 20 and 84 and they were able to find interesting discoveries. The hepatocytes are the cells responsible for the repair of the liver either when it is diseased or in cases of an inflammation. The researchers were looking to identify the age of the liver and to do so, they used radiocarbon dating. To be able to find out the age of the liver, researcher calculated the difference in the amount of carbon-14 present in the liver cells to the amount present in the atmosphere.


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The scientists discovered that everyone had the same regenerating capabilities no matter the age difference but when they looked at the age of the cells, there were a lot of variables and it looks like the liver cells last about 3 years for everyone no matter the age. Three years is a long one although not that long. In comparison, the skin cells last about 1 month before new ones regenerate, while the cell in the center of the eye lens last a person's entire life.

Now away from the liver, let me discuss another part of the body and in this case, our bones. From childhood we all know what a bone is since it is thought in elementary school although not its entire function but at least as a child you had an idea that you had a bone. The bone is responsible for protecting our organs, attachment of muscles, production of blood cells, and storage of minerals. With this listed importance of bone, I am sure you agree that they deserve their credit but funny enough, bones do a whole lot more than we give them credit for.


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How surprised are you to hear that bones play a great role in making brains grow and making them work, important in fertility especially men, and they keep us from getting hungry. Scientists also discovered that bones produce hormones and other chemicals for metabolism and sexual function, which means that they are endocrine organs.

Bones are made up of calcium and contain different types of cells which have different functions with some good at storing for instance adipocytes which stores fat or nutrients, some good at making cells like the hematopoietic stem cells which makes platelet, red blood cells, and white blood cells, other cells in the bone shape the tissue cells in the bone such as osteoblasts that is responsible for making bones and osteoclast that is responsible for destroying bones so that me and you do not have too much or too little bones.


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Bones also communicate with the body so as to be able to release chemicals when needed. For instance the bones marrow fat cells produce adiponectin when the body is low on incoming calories which makes the cells more sensitive to insulin allowing for more sugar to removed from the bloodstream. Still on taking up sugar, osteoblast in the bone produces a hormone known as osteocalcin which causes the muscles cells to absorb more sugar, boost insulin production, and increase insulin sensitivity. Adiponectin hormone triggers cells in the skeletal muscles to use energy more efficiently.

Osteoblast is very important to the body especially during times of hunger. It produces a protein called lipocalin-2 which has ability to cross the blood-brain barrier so reduce the hunger signals sent by the brain. Back to Osteocalcin which is a hormone that helps regulate male fertility. It turns out that there are a lot of thing we do not know about our body including the ones we think we know a lot about like the liver and the bone.



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