A team of researchers announces that they have identified a "new organ":a set of previously unnoticed bilateral salivary glands in the human nasopharynx. Details of the study are published in the journal Radiotherapy and oncology.
The human body is an incredibly complex machine that, even today, continues to amaze us. Take the organs. For the vast majority, they represent a set of tissues contributing to the realization of a physiological function. By adopting this definition, we have long thought that the human body has 78 organs (men and women combined).
However, this "official" list has recently been upgraded. Three years ago, for example, researchers at University Hospital Limerick indeed suggested considering the mesentery as a new organ in the human body.
More recently, Dutch researchers made a surprise anatomical discovery, isolating what appears to be a new set of salivary glands nestled at the back of the nasopharynx .
The latter would have been identified when doctors examined patients suffering from prostate cancer with a PSMA PET-scan. Concretely, this machine, associated with injections of radioactive glucose, makes it possible to highlight the tumors present in the body.
Until now, we thought humans developed three sets of so-called "major" salivary glands:the parotid, submandibular, and sublingual glands. The latter produce the saliva essential to the functioning of our digestive system. We know that there are also about a thousand additional so-called "minor" salivary glands, which are microscopic, located throughout the oral cavity and the aerodigestive tract.
That said, this new set of glands, isolated precisely behind the nose and above the palate, near the center of the human head , would belong to the first category. They have been named "tubarian glands" by doctors, in reference to their anatomical location (above the torus tubarius).
The discovery of these tubal glands is not an isolated case. Indeed, they were observed in the PSMA PET/CT scans of around 100 patients examined during the study. They were also identified on two corpses – a male and a female.
How could we have missed them all this time? Hard to say. The researchers point out that the structures, located under the base of the skull, are not very accessible. According to them, it would even be impossible to tell them apart by means other than the new PSMA-PET / CT imaging techniques. It is also possible that they were noticed before, but eventually confused with other sets of glands.
Of course, further research by other teams will be needed to confirm this new finding . If so, then we can determine their true functions. the researchers also point out that these new structures should be considered in the context of radiotherapy treatments for cancer patients, the salivary glands being indeed very sensitive to this type of approach .
