Scientists reclassify a new organ in the human digestive system
Researchers have reclassified a new organ in the human digestive system. Previously thought to be just a few fragmented structures in the digestive system, the mesentery is, in fact, one continuous organ, the scientists realized.
Although its function is still unclear, the discovery opens up “a whole new area of science,” according to J. Calvin Coffey, a researcher at the University Hospital Limerick in Ireland who first discovered it.
Studying the new organ could be the key to better understanding and treatment of abdominal and digestive disease.
“Now we have established anatomy and the structure. The next step is the function. If you understand the function you can identify abnormal function, and then you have disease,” he said. “Put them all together and you have the field of mesenteric science.”
The evidence for the organ’s reclassification is now published in The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology.
Following its reclassification, medical students are now being taught that the mesentery is a distinct organ. Gray’s Anatomy, the world’s most famous medical textbook, has been updated to include the new definition.
The mesentery is a double fold of peritoneum – the lining of the abdominal cavity – that attaches our intestine to the wall of our abdomen, and keeps everything locked in place.
Leonardo da Vinci made one of the earliest descriptions of the mesentery. For centuries, it was generally ignored as a type of insignificant attachment. Over the past century, doctors who studied the mesentery assumed it was a fragmented structure made of separate sections, which made it pretty unimportant.
But in 2012, Coffey and his colleagues showed through detailed microscopic examinations that the mesentery is actually a continuous structure.
Over the past four years, they’ve gathered further evidence that the mesentery should actually be classified as its own distinct organ, and the latest paper makes it official.
While itdoesn’t change the structure that’s been inside human bodies all along, with the organ’s reclassification comes a whole new field of medical science that could improve our health outcomes.
That means that medical students and researchers will now investigate what role – if any – the mesentery might play on abdominal diseases, and that understanding will hopefully lead to better outcomes for patients.
Although there are generally considered to be five vital organs in the human body – the brain, heart, lungs, liver and kidneys – there are in fact now 79 organs in total, including the mesentery.
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