At this point, most of us probably think that we would already know everything there’s to know about the human body, especially if we take into account how often people undergo MRI machines for testing and how many people are cut open during surgeries.
However, it turns out there’s more to be discovered. Namely, a group of scientists found a whole new organ that was unknown until this point.
And, they noticed it accidentally. This organ comes in a pair and it’s apparently located in our face. Let’s learn more about it!
New Organ Discovered in the Human Face
A group of oncologists was doing cancer research when they came across what we now know as the tubarial glands.
The scientists from the Netherlands Cancer Institute worked hard to learn more about head and neck tumors and during scanning, they accidentally discovered a part of the face that they didn’t know.
The patients were injected with radioactive glucose prior to their scans in order to make the tumors more noticeable. But, as the team scanned through all of their 100 patients, they noticed that the same two parts in the head lit up repeatedly.
According to the team, this was the new organ which they describe as a pair of salivary glands in the back of the nasopharynx (the upper part of our throat, behind the nose). The scientists decided to name these organs the tubarial glands.
Wouter Vogel, the author of the study published in the Radiotherapy and Oncology journal, explains that humans have three sets of big salivary glands, but they’re not there.
The only salivary or mucous glands, to their knowledge, in the nasopharynx are exceptionally small, and up to 1,000 are spread out evenly throughout the mucosa. So, they were really surprised to discover new glands.
Did the Discovery of New Organs Help the Cancer Research of the Team?
The accidental discovery of these glands has been of high relevance to the mission of the team, that is, to radiotherapy which is used for the destruction of cancer cells, but which can cause problems in the salivary glands.
By discovering the tubarial glands, radiotherapists will now be able to avoid delivering radiation to this part of the body and reduce the risk of further complications.
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