Your senior’s liver is incredibly important for her overall health. Liver disease or liver damage can both create big problems for her, especially if they go unnoticed for too long.

Why Is the Liver So Important?

The liver is where your senior’s body does a lot of detoxifying and filtering. Blood from the digestive tract flows into the liver, full of nutrients picked up from the food your senior eats. The liver filters out those nutrients and parcels them out to the rest of the organs and systems in your senior’s body. If there are any toxins or unusable nutrients or chemicals that end up at the liver, it removes them from the blood before sending the “cleaned” blood back out into the body. When your senior’s liver isn’t filtering, all sorts of things end up in your body that should have been removed.

Can You Prevent Liver Issues?

Ideally, you want your senior to never have problems with her liver. Toward that end, it’s important to make sure that her liver keeps working as well as it always has. Being careful about medications and restricting alcohol intake are just two ways to protect your senior’s liver. There may be other steps that she should take, so talk to her doctor about your senior’s risk for damaging her liver.

How Can You Tell the Liver Isn’t Doing Well?

Knowing the signs of liver trouble is really important so that you can get help from your senior as soon as possible. If your elderly family member is really tired most of the time and is experiencing other issues, like swelling in her lower legs and pain in her abdomen, then talk with her doctor. If you notice that her skin or eyes start to turn more yellow, this is called jaundice and is a big indication that there’s something going on with her liver.

What Can You Do about Liver Disease?

What your senior can do to treat liver disease depends on what sort of issues her liver is dealing with. If she’s fallen and received a blow to the liver that bruises it, your senior may heal just fine over time. But if the problem is more severe, as many decades of heavy drinking, then the solution may be more complicated.
If your elderly family member is dealing with a damaged liver, she may need some extra help. A caregiver can help her when she’s too exhausted to handle certain tasks. They can also help with health-related issues.

If you or an aging loved-one are considering hiring Elder Care in San Mateo, CA, call the caring staff at Aviva In-Home Care.
Call today: (415) 795-2203

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Evan Loevner

CEO at Aviva In-Home Care

As a former hospital administrator, I launched Aviva with the goal of having a more focused, direct impact on the delivery of care than I could ever accomplish within a hospital setting. For me, the joy of running an organization like Aviva In-Home Care is having the ability to positively improve the lives of individuals needing customized care. As a passionate Bay Area resident, I know that many local seniors can benefit from new approaches to in-home care, that will bring them more connection to the community, and provide families with a greater sense of comfort that their loved one is indeed matched with an ideal caregiver.

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