Know Your Gall Bladder

by Dr. Harold Gunatillake

Gall bladder is a pear shaped sac hidden under the liver and connected through its duct to the common bile duct. Its main function is to store bile a greenish secretion formed in your liver. Bile is really an excretory product of the liver to get rid of excess cholesterol and bile acid required for the digestion of fatty foods in the proximal small gut. It is coloured because it contains breakdown products of the blood pigment haemoglobin. It excretes a bile pigment called bilirubin which is orange or yellow and its oxidized form biliverdin, which is green. When you eat your food, especially fatty food the gall bladder squeezes the bile into the gut.

When you experience those bitter irritating acid juice you eruct in bouts of vomiting, due to stomach upsets, and the fluid that comes out last would be bile. Sometimes such attacks are called bilious episodes.

When the gall bladder gets diseased with inflammation and stones, it is surgically removed without any hesitation, as the gall bladder is not essential. Bile without being normally stored in the gall bladder will directly flow into the duodenal part of the small gut. The bile may be more fluid unlike the thicker concentrated bile that squeezes out of the gall bladder.

You need to be more careful with foods after the gall bladder is removed. Eating less fatty food is advised. Did you know that cholesterol in your food you eat is not water soluble or you may say virtually insoluble in an aqueous environment, and is broken down into a suspension called emulsification? So bile acid is necessary to solubilize the fatty foods, including cholesterol. This stresses the importance of bile in the digestive process of fats in the form of triglycerides and other lipids.

Gall stones
Gallstones are hard masses of bile salts, pigments and cholesterol that collect in the gall bladder.

Stagnant bile may irritate the gallbladder and may result in inflammation. This state it is called Acute cholecystitis.

Blockage in the common bile duct can further cause jaundice-yellow colouration of the body. Further, the liver and pancreas can get damaged and cause inflammation. These stones need to be removed. The gallbladder generally is removed totally and the bile duct stones are removed manually to unblock the canal.

Gall bladder disease is suspected when there is tenderness in the region of the gall bladder and X ray-dye investigations confirm the diagnosis.There is a saying that when the gallbladder is removed there is a tendency to get fat. It is also true that fat women tend to get the disorder more than thin ones.

So, if you get nauseas, having pain in the upper right side of your tummy, remember it could be a gall bladder problem.

These stones grow very slowly over the years by more crystallization and sometimes you could find a single large stone within the sac.

They are harmless and remain resting, but when they try to push out themselves can block the cystic duct that connects the gallbladder to the common bile duct.