MicroFactzzz#0043 · 🧬 Human Glitch
You Can Cut Away Most of a Liver and It'll Just Grow Itself Back
The human liver has a regenerative ability unmatched by any other major organ — even after losing most of its mass, it can rebuild itself back to nearly full size.
The liver is an outlier among the body's major internal organs: even if a large portion of it is removed, the remaining tissue can rebuild the organ's full mass within a few months.
This ability is what makes "living donor" liver transplants possible — surgeons can take a section of liver from a healthy donor for a recipient, and the donor's liver eventually regrows to nearly its original size, just as the transplanted section grows to the size the recipient needs.
The mechanism isn't like a lizard regrowing its exact former shape of a lost tail — the remaining liver cells simply start multiplying intensively, adding tissue mass until the organ reaches the right size again.
No other large, complex internal human organ — not the heart, not the lungs, not the kidneys — comes anywhere close to this ability to rebuild after such extensive damage.
Sources
- General knowledge / encyclopedic sources
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Krulicza Nora
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