Sign in. It’s quick, free and it’s up to you.
An account is an optional way to support the work we do. Find out more.
YOU PROBABLY HAVEN’T heard about the mesentery but without it you wouldn’t be able to stand up.
Until recently, this six-foot long part of the digestive system wasn’t classified as a single organ in medical textbooks, but now largely thanks to surgeons at the University of Limerick it is.
Basically, what the mesentery does is keep your intestine in place in way that means it doesn’t have to be attached to your abdomen.
J Calvin Coffey, Professor of Surgery at the Graduate Entry Medical School in the University of Limerick, says you should be thankful for it every time you walk to the kettle.
“The small intestine has a spiral conformation and that’s important,” he explains.
“It’s determined by the mesentery because the mesentery attaches to the body wall in a spiral conformation.
What that means is when you stand up, let’s say want to make a cup of coffee, your intestine doesn’t fall into your pelvis and stop working. It keeps it in the right shape and keeps it suspended, it means we can all stand up.
The existence of the mesentery isn’t a complete surprise. Doctors have always known it was there but it was thought there were several mesenteries keeping your insides secure.
Instead, work by Coffey and his colleagues on patients who have had their colons removed was able to prove that it was one continuous structure.
This idea was suggested as far back as Leonardo da Vinci, who drew it as single structure, but erroneous descriptions in the 19th century have until recently been repeated as dogma.
Medical journal The Lancet recently published the results of Coffey’s research and the mesentery has also now been listed as an organ in human anatomy textbook Gray’s Anatomy.
It’s not just for research though. Coffey explains that knowing the true make-up of the mesentery and its place in the digestive system could make for less invasive surgeries.
“The embryonic roadmap that the body was put together in, persists into adulthood,” he says.
So we can identify embryological planes and the network of planes. We can actually identify them, act with them and dissect along them. By doing that we can, almost bloodlessly, separate things along the planes that nature actually put things together in the first instance.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
Contrary to the headline, I think you will find that the organ was always there, just not identified as such until recently.
Nobody invented an organ, we didn’t all get a “new” organ.
We actually new it was there since da Vinci it’s only now it has been classified as a single continuous organ, also Coffey isn’t the first since da Vinci to state this, it has been mentioned in many journals over the years and until now ignored so well to J. Calvin Coffey for getting listened to!
Evidence please? Haven’t you heard of the Mandela Effect?
Thanks Brian. I thought the headline didn’t give the full story alright. That why I had to read the article. Would you suggest they skip the article and squeeze it all in to the headline?
@alphanautica: Why do stupid always look for evidence and never see common sense.
Another organ to look after! “Mind your mesentery now, you only have the one”!
Slightly misleading headline, but congratulations to these bright lights for their place in the history books!
Congrats Limerick. I wonder could they make a brain for Eamon Ryan?
@Val Martin: and the Limerick Leader newspaper never even mentioned this story as I read it in the Guardian over a week ago. Well done to the Limerick Leader. Shows their priorities. Too busy writing about the same dead beat local so called celebrities.
About time there was a positive outcome to a few Limerick lads using knives on a person
“A single stricture” ? You get plenty of those journal.ie especially for typos!
What should it have been? I can’t work it out?
Structure.
I read this story in the Guardian over a week ago and I wondered why Irish media didn’t pick it up especially the rag we call the Limerick Leader. Just shows you the people who run it.
It matters little where or when you read it ,it is another major advance in medical science ,why are we so petty and parochial in our thinking .
Right now you or a family member could be suffering from a disease of the mesentery and anything that creates more knowledge and a better understanding of its function surely should be welcomed by all.
It’s a real mesentery as to why it wasn’t found before !
Interview Cmedia filmed with Dr.Coffey at Regional Hospital Limerick on the discovery of the Organ in the human body.
Now play some Organ love music on it lol.
they shoul;d have called it meCentra as in i’m going down to me Centra to buy a bottle of milk.
We’ve known about the mesentery for thousands years, says Gray’s Anatomy editor Susan Standring. However, researchers have debated whether our body contained a single mesentery or mesenteries. Coffey and colleagues, in their new study, clarified the anatomic understanding of the mesentery, suggesting that it is indeed a continuous, singular entity that spans the gastrointestinal tract. But Coffey didn’t discover the mesentery, nor was he the first to describe its contiguous structure. Leonardo Da Vinci depicted it as a single organ. In 1878, Carl Toldt echoed Da Vinci’s findings, which then were echoed by anatomist Edward Congdon in 1942 and again by Wylie J. Dobbs in 1986.
But these findings were largely ignored in mainstream literature, and British surgeon Sir Frederick Treves’ description of a fragmented mesentery — from 1885 — enjoyed a long shelf life, but no longer. Gray’s Anatomy has been updated in light of mounting evidence like Coffey’s, and the mesentery is whole once again.
have your say