Researchers have acknowledged what they are calling a brand-new organ inside the human body. It's called the 'mesentery' and it's formed within the digestive system where the gut attaches to the body.
The mesentery is a pucker of the peritoneum that connects the stomach, small intestine, pancreas, spleen, and other organs to the back wall of the stomach. For so many years this part of the body was ignored because it was reasoned to be made up of multiple distinct parts.
But the review issued in the November issue of the journal The Lancet Gastroenterology and Heptology sketched an evidence for classifying the parts as one organ. "The anatomic nature that had been gave in over 100 years of anatomy was inaccurate. This organ is far from broken and complex. It is simply one unending structure," lead author Professor John Calvin Coffey said in an account.
The scholars from University of Limerick in Ireland hope that the rearrangement will lead to a better comprehension of the organ and abdominal illness.
"This is appropriate as it affects all of us," said Coffey, the Foundation Chair of Surgery at UL's Graduate Entry Medical School, and University Hospitals Limerick. "Now we have recognized anatomy and the structure. The next step will be the function. If you appreciate the function you can recognize abnormal functions, and then you have a disease."
He hopes that this new studies will also help progress surgery in this area. Future exploration could mean inexpensive, less offensive surgeries with fewer hitches and better patient healing. But it's still early days and the mesentery's specific purpose is still mysterious.
Even though, the used of medical textbook and meaning, Gray's Anatomy, has previously been updated to reflect the change in sorting. So, going forward with medical students around the world will now be education about the mesentery as one organ. Also, it could open new pathways for surgical procedure, but first they need to establish its function, and what body system it is part of.
