Scientists Discover ‘New’ Organ Hidden Within Your Face
upstart writes:
Scientists Discover 'New' Organ Hidden Within Your Face:
You'd think that existing exclusively within the human body would give way to a complete knowledge of the organs hidden within. Instead, we're constantly discovering new parts of the weird and glorious biological machine we each call home. The latest in these discoveries are the "tubarial glands," a pair of small organs responsible for producing saliva.
Oncologists from the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam were conducting cancer research earlier this year when they happened upon the "new" glands. Radiation oncologist Wouter Vogel, oral and maxillofacial surgeon Matthijs Valstar, and their team have been working to improve the research community's understanding of cancers occurring in the head and neck. They were using positron emission tomography (PET) and computed tomography (CT) scans-known for helping to track metastasizing prostate cancer-to study patients' mouth, throat, and other cancers when the scans' radioactive glucose lit up an unfamiliar part of the face.
Scan after scan, the same part of the patients' faces continued to glow. Exactly 100 consecutive patients and cadavers possessed the same strange bright spot, prompting Vogel and Valstar to investigate. Contrary to what they expected, the spot wasn't an anomaly-it was a whole new organ consisting of two salivary glands.
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