Day 2: My Continued Investigation

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    For the second day of my J-Term, I began my morning by reading more background on heart failure, specifically heart failure in relation to liver diseases and liver transplantation.
The first journal I read seemed to be a bit harder to read through than I what I read yesterday, since there were a lot more medical terms that I didn’t know of yet. Throughout the reading, I was able to learn that the there’s a deep relationship between the liver and the heart, specifically pertaining to liver transplantation (LT) and heart failure (HF). I also learned that there are many factors in which heart failure can occur due to liver disease and/or transplantation, such as cirrhotic cardiomyopathy, which can occur because of liver cirrhosis.

    The next two articles I read touched more specifically on something that I’d never learned before. They both mainly talked about the relationship between liver disease (LT) and pulmonary hypertension (PH). These articles were more shocking to me, because I never at all realized that there was an even deeper relationship between your liver and lungs. While reading both of these articles, I learned that because of liver diseases like cirrhosis, there blood that goes through the blood vessels of your lungs still contain toxins that haven’t been filtered out, which can cause pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH). I also learned that there’s a certain type of hypertension caused by advanced liver disease called Portopulmonary hypertension (POPH), which causes liver transplants to be even harder to do. 
    
The third article also talked about POPH in more depth, as well as a syndrome called Hepatopulmonary syndrome (HPS). Learning about this was again shocking to me, because I never realized the consequent syndromes and issues that occurred because of End-stage liver disease. I also was able to learn that in comparison to POPH, liver transplantation is extremely effective for End-stage liver disease patients with HPS.

After finishing my background reading, I was finished another day of my Independent J-Term!

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