Causes for Elevated Liver Levels

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Dr. Peter Kramer with Wrightsville Beach Family Medicine in Wilmington, North Carolina here to talk a little bit about elevated liver levels. There are multiple reasons you can have elevated liver levels. They're most commonly found by a simple blood test in your doctor's office but the most common reasons to have elevated liver levels would be medications, Tylenol would be a great example. Many people use Tylenol, Advil, things like that pretty randomly and they're also in multiple over the counter products so you may be getting Tylenol or acetaminophen which is the generic name for Tylenol and not even know you're getting it in multiple cold and cough remedies and over the counter products. The second most common way would be things like alcohol, very common, actually used to be found in cough and cold remedies up until recently and of course alcohol is a very common socially accepted, really it's a drug or a chemical but it's a very common cause of elevating liver enzymes. There are several other things that can elevate your liver enzymes would be viral infections, hepatitis A, B and C. You can have cancer or kind of other problems that would elevate your liver enzymes so I would say that drugs and alcohol and infections. You can have bacterial infections, those would be the four most common reasons to have elevated liver enzymes. And so that's a little bit about elevated liver enzymes."