Ever heard of the mesentery? It’s inside you…doing, well, something- it’s a newly discovered organ!
A new human organ has been discovered, according to a post on iflscience.com. Researchers have named the body part ‘the mesentery’ and it sits in our digestive system.
Scientists from the University of Limerick in Ireland are responsible for the revelation. The only catch remaining, is that no one really knows what the mesentery does for us.
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The organ seems to attach our intestines to our abdominal wall…but what goes on inside it, is a mystery.
Which is kind of fun. We know about most of our organs, as scientists found and named them hundreds of years ago. Modern medicine is now usually concentrating on other matters.
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But as Jonathan Kipnis, director of the Center for Brain Immunology and Glia at the University of Virginia has stated, “The most important things are yet to be discovered.”
Which seems to be true. In June 2015, a researcher team in Kipnis’ lab at UVA’s school of medicine discovered another human organ. The team found a system of vessels and called it the “central nervous system lymphatic vessels”.
These drain lymphatic fluid from the brain to the surrounding lymph nodes. The vessels carry fluids and immune cells from the brain, and are part of the system that deals with brain drainage and fighting off inflammation.
What’s valuable about this discovery? Learning more about this organ could help treat a box full of disorders, things like multiple sclerosis (MS) and Alzheimer’s.
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So, just when we think we know it all, we find ourselves at the beginning, again.
For its part, for the moment, the mesentery has been added to the medical textbook Gray’s Anatomy, minus its true function. When we do figure out what that is, it could be the beginning of a whole new area of science.
Photo credit: Konstantin Kolosov/Shutterstock
