Your liver helps fight infections and cleans your blood. It also helps digest food and stores energy for when you need it. You cannot live without a liver that works. If your liver fails, your doctor may put you on a waiting list for a liver transplant. Doctors do liver transplants when other treatments cannot keep a damaged liver working.

During a liver transplantation, the surgeon removes the diseased liver and replaces it with a healthy one. The new liver comes from a donor who has died. The most common reason for transplantation in adults is cirrhosis. This is a disease in which healthy liver cells are killed and replaced with scar tissue. The most common reason in children is biliary atresia, a disease of the bile ducts.

People who have transplants must take drugs for the rest of their lives to keep their bodies from rejecting their new livers.