谁来解释下最近这个炒的沸沸扬扬的新发现器官是怎么回事

http://www.mitbbs.com/article_t/Military/50139903.html

发信人: WCNMLGB (CCC), 信区: Military
标  题: 谁来解释下最近这个炒的沸沸扬扬的新发现器官是怎么回事
发信站: BBS 未名空间站 (Wed Mar 28 13:14:24 2018, 美东)

叫interstitium的东东，就是皮下间质组织吧？有什么特别的吗？原来真的都不知道？
还是只不过现在把它硬是划分为一个器官？

Scientists say they've discovered an unknown human organ
Scientists said in a study published Tuesday that they may have stumbled on
a previously unknown organ — one of the biggest in the human body and one
that could significantly advance our understanding of cancer and many other
diseases.

The research, published in the journal Scientific Reports, suggests that a
network of dense connective tissues and fluid-filled compartments called the
interstitium is a full-fledged organ — that is, a group of tissues with a
unique structure performing a specialized task, like the heart or the liver.

More than two-thirds of the human body is water, most of that contained
inside cells. Much of the rest, about 20 percent of the fluid in the body,
is "interstitial," a Latin word combining "inter," or "
between," and "sistere," or "to place" — literally, &#
34;between the other places."

That fluid and the tissues connecting them are called the interstitium (
pronounced "inter-STISH-um"), and they're found throughout the
body, both just below the skin and in the digestive, respiratory and urinary
systems.

Whether the interstitium is an actual separate organ remains to be
determined by further research. Either way, its understanding means "a
significant reassessment of anatomy affecting every organ of the body,"
said one of the lead authors, Neil D. Theise, a pathology professor at
Langone Medical Center at New York University.

Understanding the interstitium could be particularly significant in
diagnosing and tracking the spread of cancers and other diseases that spread
throughout throughout the body. Interstitial fluid is the source of lymph,
which dispatches white blood cells, the body's immune system infection
fighters, to wherever they're needed.

A federal panel of elite scientists reported in 2016 that focusing on the
immune system could be the key to finding highly effective treatments for
cancer. Theise said in an interview that the new research can be seen as
parallel to that work; moreover, because the interstitium is found
throughout the body, understanding it could have implications for an
impossible-to-predict range of systems from head to toe.

"You push the first domino down and when you look up to see where the
dominoes have fallen, you realize they've spread out everywhere," he
said.

'It's just there'
The interstitium has been hiding right under scientists' noses all along
, but it took an accident to figure out what it really is.

"There are no pictures of it. There are no illustrations of the
construct," Theise said. "It's just there."

No one saw the "in between" spaces before because the way scientists
traditionally examine human tissue (by slicing it and treating it with
chemicals) drains away its fluids. Interstitial tissues handled that way
throw off all of their fluids and, in essence, pancake like the floors of a
collapsed building.

Theise said interstitial tissues usually appear flat and solid under a
microscope, rather than as the fluid-filled sacs they actually are.

In 2015, doctors called endoscopists, who peer inside the body using long,
flexible tubes with cameras on them, found something strange when they were
using a new technology that adds a laser and a tiny microscope to light up
living tissues inside a patient's bile duct. Such examination is
described as "in vivo," meaning it takes place inside a living
organism, rather than on dead tissue on a slide.

The endoscopists, David Carr-Locke and Petros Benias of Mount Sinai Beth
Israel, the acclaimed teaching hospital in New York, noticed a series of
interconnected cavities that didn't match any known anatomy, according
to the paper. They took their images to Theise, and together, they
determined that what had appeared to be small torn spots in traditional
biopsy slides were actually the remnants of those collapsed compartments.

"Those cracks are not artifacts," Theise said Tuesday. "They'
;re the space where the fluid was."

Once the researchers recognized the real nature of the structures, they
quickly found them throughout the body, in any place where tissues move or
are compressed by external forces. (One of their functions, in fact, may be
to act like shock absorbers to keep organs, muscles and blood vessels from
tearing apart as they and the body move, the paper proposes.)

The new method of examination, the paper says, "demonstrates the power
of in vivo microscopy to generate fresh insights into the anatomy and
physiology of normal and diseased tissues."

On a fundamental level, it says, "our findings necessitate
reconsideration of many of the normal functional activities of different
organs and of disordered fluid dynamics in the setting of disease, including
fibrosis and metastasis" — that is, the spread of cancer.

Theise said that when he and his colleagues realized the magnitude of what
they'd found, it meant one fundamental thing: "The microanatomy of
the entire body needed to be re-examined."

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