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Move Over Skin…There’s a Bigger Organ in the Body!

Say hello to your interstitium.

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By: TOM BRANNA

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Cosmetic chemists have been reading between the lines for decades. After all, as everyone knows, it's the mortar in the bricks-and-mortar makeup of the stratum corneum where much of the magic happens. Now, researchers have detailed the structure and distribution of spaces in the body that they maintain represent a newfound human organ, and this “organ” just might be your body's biggest — but not all experts are convinced.

 
It's the part of the body known as the interstitium, a name for widespread, fluid-filled spaces within and between body tissues, according to a study published in the journal Scientific Reports.

 
Doctors and scientists have known about interstitial tissue and interstitial fluid, but the study provides fresh insights into a previously unrecognized feature of human anatomy — and the researchers are raising the idea of calling the interstitium an “organ.”


“Initially, we were just thinking it's an interesting tissue, but when you actually delve into how people define organs, it sort of runs around one or two ideas: that it has a unitary structure or that it's a tissue with a unitary structure, or it's a tissue with a unitary function,” said Dr. Neil Theise, professor of pathology at NYU Langone Health in New York, who was a co-senior author of the study.
“This has both,” he said of the interstitium. “This structure is the same wherever you look at it, and so are the functions that we're starting to elucidate.”

 
Additionally, “I think it's bigger than the skin,” he said. The skin, comprising roughly 16% of your body mass, is thought to be your largest organ. As for the interstitium, “my estimate is that 20% of the volume of the body is this, which is equivalent to about 10 liters in a young adult.”




 

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