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Mars Essay

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MARS, also known as molecular absorbent recirculating system, originally was a machine designed to give patients suffering from chronic liver failure a bridge to transplant and increase their chances of survival. MARS has proven to be quite successful among this group of patients. “MARS was first approved by the FDA in 2005 for use in drug overdoses and then received an additional indication for use in hepatic encephalopathy due to decompensated chronic liver disease in 2012.” (Hannish, et al., 2017) MARS is generally used in patients with a primary hepatic failure and not liver failure due to systemic illness. However this still leaves the group of patients diagnosed with acute liver failure as a result of trauma, poisoning, or overdose. …show more content…

It has also been used on patients who have overdosed on cocaine, amphetamines, and mdma but is not widely used on patients suffering from an overdose on those specific illicit drugs. Nurses and doctors will immediately assess the patient and run labs to determine the extent of liver damage and whether they qualify for MARS therapy. These labs include, serum lactate, Creatinine, albumin, AST, ALT, INR, PTT, and ammonia levels. Patients are also placed on continuous EEG monitoring.
MARS is an albumin-based therapy whereby albumin dialysis is the process of cleansing the blood of protein-bound toxins by exposing the blood to an albumin dialysate and, thus extracting the toxins from blood protein carriers. The reason behind this phenomenon is a direct result of filtering blood with albumin bound proteins in an albumin solution. This forces the toxins to separate from the albumin in the blood and essentially cleanse the patients blood of all the poison or drug (Mcready,2009). The biological toxins that build up within the bloodstream are detrimental to the other organs and most often result in multi organ failure. Ridding the body of these toxins as quickly as possible increases a patients chances for survival.
McCready (2009) describes the purpose of MARS, as an Albumin dialysis for the treatment of liver failure. Liver failure occurs when there is a loss

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