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Major New Function Discovered For the Spleen
circletimessquare writes "The spleen doesn't get much respect — as one researcher put it, 'the spleen lacks the gravitas of neighboring organs.' Those undergoing a splenectomy seem to be able to carry on without any consequences. However, some studies have suggested an enhanced risk of early death for those who have undergone splenectomies. Now researchers have discovered why: the spleen apparently serves as a vast reservoir for monocytes, the largest of the white blood cells, the wrecking crew of the immune system. After major trauma, such as a heart attack, the monocytes are disgorged into the blood stream and immediately get to work repairing the damage. '"The parallel in military terms is a standing army," said Matthias Nahrendorf, an author of the report. "You don't want to have to recruit an entire fighting force from the ground up every time you need it."'"
So how long are their deployments?
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How could they miss that? I'm sure someone cut open a spleen before and looked at it through a microscope. Wouldn't you see an unusually high concentration of the monocytes?
Somehow, I always find it amazing the things we don't know about. We know the makeup of the universe down to a couple of percentage points. We know what subatomic particles do what, and have theories to predict other ones that have virtually no effect on our universe. We know when the sun is going to run out of fuel and have pretty accurate theories about what will happen to the solar system when that happens.
Yet, somehow, we don't know the basic workings of our own bodies.
However, some studies have suggested an enhanced risk of early death for those who have undergone splenectomies
I don't see how this is a problem. This is a new discovery- those old spleens didn't have this functionality yet.
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My Dad had his spleen removed when he was a kid, and a number of years ago (10) was told he had to carry a card around with him that said something like
"I have had my spleen removed and may be subject to overwhelming infection."
Seriously. We told him he shouldn't use that as his opening gambit when talking to girls :-)
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is because in modern life, we just don't get beat up that much
that is, early, more primitive man was probably getting the shit kicked out of him a lot, from the environment, and other humans. such that you needed a repository of monocytes at the ready for immediate damage repair a lot more often, as a survival advantage
civilized more sedentary life, meanwhile, with all of the medical support that affords, means we could not easily see why removing the spleen had any jeopardy attached to it
we can survive just fine, even without this organic built-in trauma preparedness kit, as long as we have trauma inpatient units at the hospital close by
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Lovely! This goes along with a recent discovery that the Appendix serves as reservoir for the gastrointestinal system's supply of friendly microbes which help digest our food.
No news yet on earlobes.
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Funny, I always believed that the spleen was the center of the immune system. I got lymphoma (the AIDS of cancers) ten years ago, and I gave thanks that it was caught early enough that I didn't need to have my spleen removed, only a tumorous lymph node in my neck, followed by some radiotherapy.
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You can lose a kidney, gall bladder, tonsils, etc. and they MUST have either had a use at one point or are meant for a very specific, yet seldom used task, i.e the Spleen being a repository for big white blood cells
Uh as pointed out kidneys have a rather important, crucial, and well-known use. The reason you can lose one is because the function the kidneys provide is so important that you evolved two so you have a backup.
The gall bladder does not provide a crucial function so it can be removed but this is not without consequence. Especially before your digestive system adjusts, you will have some quite noticeable side effects. Read: You don't want to be very far from a bathroom.
Tonsils are part of the lymphatic system. You can afford to lose them, but you are more likely to get upper respiratory infections.
These have all been known for a long time.
A better example of something thought to be useless which turned out not to be would be the appendix, which was thought to be a holdover from our purely herbivorous ancestors. But then recently they discovered it had another use -- as a reserve pocket of digestive bacteria that can be used to "reboot" the digestive system if something wipes out the microbes in the intestines.
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I understand that, my point is that our bodies have some tendency to have organs perform functions that in today's world are overkill, i.e the fact that you can survive with only ONE kidney.
I wasn't implying I didn't understand their function, or that I thought I could EASILY live without one of my kidneys, however I was commenting on how I find it interesting, that due in large part to modern medicine, and our diets, we can function, in some cases thrive, while missing entire ORGANS, I think that is "neat" and also makes me curious on how contaminated things like our blood and urine must have been to require 2 kidneys and other "non-essential" organs
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I knew there was something fishy about the logic used in the summary. Could we not conclude that unhealthy spleens are a symptom of an overall attribute of unhealthiness for that person? The fact that they die early doesn't tell you very much about the spleen's role in the death. By analogy:
"However, some studies have suggested an enhanced risk of early death for those who have undergone bulletectomies after being shot with a bullet."
You would not draw from this statement the conclusion that bullets were somehow important for life. :-) Not that I disbelieve the rest of the findings, but I think this is probably another gross oversimplification about the reason why we were studying spleens.
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You can lose "a" kidney because you have 2. If you lose both, you are dead... We have two because without one we are dead, and they are in a fairly unprotected part of the human body, so our ancestors/predictors who developed two tended to survive to procreate better then the ones without two.
The tonsils are part of the lymphatic system and also help our immune system (like the spleen) mainly by being the mechanism where the ducts for our immune system to access the upper repritory system (i.e. mouth, throat). You can "live" without tosils, but you are more prone to respritory infections, which is manageable in this post-penicillin medical world.
The gall bladder is actually something that is very important to the digestive system. It isn't a "vital" organ (again, meaning you can live without it), but fatty foods will possibly not be handled properly by the body. The gall bladder stores up and concentrates the bile (produced in your kidneys) and regulates when to release it into the digestive tract properly. Without the gall bladder, the kidneys are directly releasing the gall into the tract whenever the kidney produces it. The trigger to produce bile is fat in the blood stream, which happens by absorption in the digestive tract as well as from other sources as well. One possible major drawback to not having a gall bladder is that you might be running to the closest bathroom almost immediately after eating a meal which contained lots of fats because your kidney just dumped a ton of bile into your digestive tract and you have automatic diarrhea from that much gall.
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You need all of the things you listed to live a normal life. Sure, you can SURVIVE without those organs but medicine/science have known for quite awhile now that losing your spleen makes you vulnerable to infections, which is why you typically get vaccines galore before removing it (vaccines aren't a replacement for spleens, btw; it's better than nothing!). I think anyone's who's had their gall bladder removed will tell you they wish they had a functioning one. It helps make your stool a lot more pleasant! While you can live quite awhile with only one kidney, there's evidence out there that kidney donors may have shortened lifespans. Your tonsils are lymph nodes which house immune cells.
By your reasoning, it doesn't appear we need 5 fingers on each hand. We can surely survive with 4, 3, or even none. For that matter, might as well get rid of that pesky arm!
There's a difference between being necessary for life, and being really really REALLY useful.
Our bodies are far more complex than a broad view of the universe. There are many interconnecting processes that all work together to use energy from our environment. The universe, ignoring the living things,can be described with far fewer vocabulary words than biology. While our bodies have a lower score on size than the universe, our bodies have a higher score on complexity, and it is complexity that makes a subject difficult. Once the GUT is found and fully understood, physics should be nothing but a small set of axioms. Biology is shaped through many many years of random events and chance encounters that cannot be quantified except with a vocabulary word.
Some people even have more than two. My grandfather has a third, smaller kidney that is fully functional.
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I would argue the heart is more important and therefore we should have 2 of them instead. Since most people die of heart failure than kidney failure.
Sure the heart is more important. But I should think that the heart is an "expensive" organ and so any benefit has to be weighed against that. Plus I see a lot of practical engineering problems in trying to hook up two hearts in parallel. It may be that once you've already evolved an organ as strong and robust as the heart that it's too big a move from the local maximum to get to a two-heart situation, vs simply continuing to evolve the single heart towards more robustness.
One the other hand, we have two lungs. But one diaphragm.
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From PubMed, search terms 'spleen, function, monocyte, review' meaning it's only turn up review articles that cover collections of previous articles on the subject. Those research articles would be older, the reviews not so much. Still, 35 years is a fair bit of wallop to the "new discovery" claim, no?
Clin Haematol. 1975 Oct;4(3):685-703. Mononuclear phagocyte proliferation, maturation and function.
Territo MC, Cline MJ.
The mononuclear phagocytic system is a continuum of cells beginning with the bone marrow monoblast and promonocyte, through the monocyte to the larger tissue macrophages and multinucleate giant cells. This system of cells is widely distributed throughout the body in the blood and bone marrow; the pleural, peritoneal, and alveolar spaces; the lymph nodes, spleen, liver, and other parenchymal organs. The activity and composition of the cell varies with the level of maturation, changes in cellular environment, and with various cellular activities. The monocyte-macrophage group of cells plays an active role in defense reactions against certain microorganisms, and in the removal of dying cells and cell debris. They are an integral part of both the inductive phase of the immune response, and of cell-mediated immune reactions. In addition, they probably play a role in the defence against spontaneously arising tumours, in the control of granulopoiesis, and possibly in erythropoiesis.
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I think that is "neat" and also makes me curious on how contaminated things like our blood and urine must have been to require 2 kidneys and other "non-essential" organs
Remember that kidneys aren't only for filtering waste, their other primary functions are salt and bicarbonate recovery, pH balance (getting rid of excess H+ ions using phosphates and NH3 from the glutamine -> glutamate reaction), and water recovery. In fact, with the elongated Loop of Henle, one could argue that water retention in arid environments is one of the primary functions of the human kidney. They are very good at concentrating and getting rid of nitrogenous wastes while retaining important water, salts, and bicarbonate. This is probably a product of evolving in Eastern Africa. ;)
Point being, having two kidneys is probably less due to toxicity of blood and more due to efficient water and salt recovery as organisms moved from aquatic to terrestrial environments. Just sayin'. :)
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but you meant to say "liver" instead of "kidney" everywhere in the third paragraph. the liver creates bile that empties into the gallbladder, not the kidneys
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(Warning: original research)
I've measured the frequency of organs are referenced in Shakespeare's complete works, including sonnets and other poems. The corpus I used was the World Library version of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare available via Project Gutenberg. It doesn't mention whether these are folio or quarto versions, so the results are approximation. In each category, I included singular and plural forms as labeled below.
(I'm not even going to try to cover Shakespeare's references to sex organs.)
heart(s): 1208
brain(s): 139
womb(s): 56
stomach(s): 59
vein(s)/artery/arteries: 43
gall: 36
liver(s): 33
spleen(s): 30
lung(s): 19
intestine(s)/guts: 17
kidney(s): 2
bladder/bladders(s): 1 [some mentions of bladder don't refer to the organ]
Shakespeare thus appears to have had has anatomical priorities in order.
Why not...
Two hearts? difficult to coordinate two hearts. Also, chances are that if damage is extreme enough to destroy the heart, chances are that a backup heart wouldn't significantly boost the chance of reproductive success after that point. (Heart disease is irrelevant as it occurs after reproductive age.)
Two brains? first of all, it'd be impossible to coordinate the actions of two brains. Second, the brain already has quite a bit of internal redundancy. Sufficiently young children with entire hemispheres removed can grow up normally. People who suffer multiple concussions can still switch in spare circuitry and return to normal capacity (at least until later in life.)
Two mouths? Where would you put the second one, and what structure would you develop into it? Evolution doesn't allow an organism to develop a structure wherever it would be convenient, but only to modify existing ones to suit a new purpose.
The kidney is a simple organ prone to infection and mounted in a vulnerable position in the body. I can definitely see how having a spare would increase the odds of reproductive success at minimum cost.