You might not feel any different, but doctors have just decided you have a brand new organ.
It’s called the mesentery, and we aren’t quite sure what it does yet. But now that it’s been officially approved as an organ in its own right, a whole new field of study can arise from the discovery.
The infamous medical textbook, Gray’s Anatomy, has even been updated, and trainee doctors are now being taught about the distinct new organ.
As if poor medical students needed more body parts to remember.
The existence of this obscure part of your digestive system isn’t new, and legendary polymath Leonardo Da Vinci even drew it while studying anatomy in the 1500s.
Although Da Vinci drew it as one continuous structure, up until now, the mesentery was thought to be a complex muddle of separate membranes attaching the intestine to the abdominal wall.
Because of this structure, for hundreds of years it was dismissed as unimportant, but Leonardo’s drawings have now been proved correct.
Small intestinal mesentry might be classified as an organ lmao i can feel my anatomy notes increasing exponentially
— Turb up new me(mes) (@symphoniees) January 3, 2017
Investigating scientist from this century, Prof J Calvin Coffey of the University of Limerick, showed that it was a single structure back in 2012 using microscopic examinations.However, in his latest paper, published in The Lancet Gastroenterlogy & Hepatology, which has now been peer-reviewed, he says the mesentery is a totally separate organ.“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,” said Coffey.
Enough with new diseases. Now we have a new organ. https://t.co/uQFwGUGKPX
— Skeptical Scalpel (@Skepticscalpel) January 3, 2017
Although we’ve had them all along, now doctors know exactly what the mesentery is, they can investigate why it goes wrong, which should soon translate into better diagnoses and new treatments for people with gastrointestinal problems.