Researchers have declared that a digestive system mass long thought to be disparate bits and pieces is, in fact, a single organ.
They’re calling it the mesentery. As for what function it performs, nobody is quite sure.
The discovery was made by Irish researcher J Calvin Coffey at University Hospital Limerick.
He told Science Alert, “When we approach it like every other organ...we can categorise abdominal disease in terms of this 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. Put them all together and you have the field of mesenteric science.”
