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An Irish surgeon and his team of medical researcher have discovered a new organ in the human body.
Although most of the human body’s major organs have already been classified, an Irish surgeon manages to surprise the scientific community after announcing that he and his team discovered a new organ. The discovery of the new organ can lead to major improvements in the area of digestive surgery.
Calvin Coffey, a professor, teaching at the University of Limerick, and the one who discovered the new organ said that the scientific potential is immeasurable. The new organ is called the mesentery, and the professor’s discovery has easily shattered a century-old medical fact.
Technically speaking, Coffey did not discover the mesentery, but merely reclassified it. The mesentery has been described in ample details by none other than Leonardo da Vinci who noted that this is it contiguous, meaning that it’s one single organ, not something disjointed.
Leonardo’s theory regarding the structure of the mesentery remained unchallenged until the 19th century when Sir Frederick Treves, a British surgeon, disproved his theory, stating that the mesentery is not an organ, but a disjointed group of parts.
This belief according to which the mesentery was not an organ has been disproved by Coffey, who reclassified it. His findings have been published in The Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology Journal in late November.
With Coffey’s disproval of the Treves’s theory comes and additional challenge: if the mesentery is contiguous and, therefore an organ, what is its function? Coffey declared that, at the moment, there are just too many unknowns.
He also admitted that the new organ could very well play a role in any of our body’s systems, but it still requires a great deal of research before we can understand it.
Why is the Professor’s finding considered a medical breakthrough? Coffey declared that this reclassification could open up a whole new area of anatomic research which could focus on less invasive intestinal surgery, faster patient recovery, and cost effective surgery techniques.
Although the professor and his team have not discovered the exact function of the new organ, they believe that it plays a major role in the human body. Coffey also declared that disproving a thing that worked for the century is not enough, and now we got to find out exactly what that thing does.
At the moment, Coffey began to research the impact of the mesentery’s reclassification.
Image source: Wikipedia
