Some discoveries change the way we view the human body.
In 2021, researchers described what they saw when they had examined skin-biopsy samples that included tattoos: The ink particles had traveled deeper than anticipated, through interstitial spaces into the tissue underneath the skin, or the fascia.
“That wasn’t supposed to happen,” Neil Theise, a professor of pathology at New York University and a senior author of the paper reporting the results, told me.
The existence of an apparent conduit between skin and the fascia beneath it — two tissue layers not known to connect with each other in this way — broke accepted anatomic boundaries.
The researchers also found that the same was true for other previously unknown microscopic connections between organs in the abdomen.
That interstitial spaces exist in and under the skin and between and around the body’s organs had been observed going back more than a century, but they were assumed to exist in isolation from one another, like a patchwork quilt.
Theise and his colleagues published their first observations of these spaces in 2018. Their findings in the 2021 tattoo-ink study implied that the body’s interstitial spaces were parts of a vast interconnected whole — what scientists now call the interstitium.
“This is clearly a third bodily system for the circulation of fluids,” in addition to the cardiovascular and lymphatic systems, says Rebecca Wells, a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior author of the study. The human body suddenly looked less like a patchwork quilt and more like a knitted blanket.
The implications of a new circulatory system — for our health, and for our understanding of our own bodies — are potentially enormous.
For 400 years, anatomists have understood there to be two systems in the body that function as transportation networks for cells, electrolytes, nutrients and hormones: the lymphatic system and the cardiovascular system.
Source: Drudge Report
