Scientists Discover Previously Unknown Organ in the Human Body

It happened completely by chance.

Scientists have discovered an organ in the human body that, for some reason, has never been noticed in the entire history of medicine. This is reported in a study by Science Alert.

The discovery was made by Dutch scientists Matthijs Valstar and Wouter Vogel from the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam. In their study, published in the scientific journal Radiotherapy and Oncology, dental surgeon Valstar and radiation oncologist Vogel described how they made this unusual find.

This "unknown entity" was accidentally found by doctors while examining prostate cancer patients using an advanced type of scan. Combined with injections of radioactive glucose, this diagnostic tool detects tumors in the body. In this case, however, it revealed something completely different, located at the back of the nasopharynx.

Humans have three major pairs of salivary glands, and there are also about 1,000 minor salivary glands located throughout the oral cavity and digestive tract, but they are generally too small to be seen without a microscope.

The new discovery made by Vogel's team revealed what is a previously overlooked pair of glands—something like a fourth set of major salivary glands, located behind the nose and above the palate, close to the center of the human head. "As far as we know, this structure did not correspond to previous anatomical descriptions," the researchers explain in their paper.

As for why the glands had not been identified earlier, the researchers suggest that these structures are located in a hard-to-reach anatomical area beneath the base of the skull, which makes them difficult to distinguish endoscopically.

Previously, researchers in Blood Advances made a new discovery related to the coronavirus: they found new evidence of a link between blood type and the course of coronavirus disease. According to them, people with blood type A in the AB0 system, unlike those with type B and AB, may have a lower risk of infection with the coronavirus, and their symptoms may be milder.