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."'"
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 [google.com]
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?
Both are the sorts of organs we needed a long time ago, when infections and food poisoning would have been everyday occurrences, but not so much anymore. So it's no surprise that their functions aren't that obvious.
Not really, it's only in a relatively small part of the world where the appendix isn't that useful. Curiously, that's the developed world where there's also relatively easy access to apendectomies. But by population, the vast majority of people still need and use it. And even in the developed world, people do use it, it's just not as important with the easy access to probiotics.
The obsession, is relatively reasonable. What isn't reasonable is the tendency to relegate still useful things into that category.
The ability to wiggle ones ears is a pretty good example, unless you can do it, you'd never appreciate the help that is in figuring out where sounds are coming from. Sure it's not as useful as it was. Well, scratch that, with all the randomly beeping things we have in the modern era it helps one figure out where they are hiding.
In the grand view of things, medical science is still in it's infancy, even if it's late infancy; there are still more things that are NOT understood than that ARE understood. From my layman's perspective it seems to me like trying to work on an automobile's engine while it's running, but unlike that engine, if you shut down and dismantle the human engine, you can't just put it back together again, pour gas and oil in it, and expect it to run ever again. It seems that since we have developed better and better imaging technologies this situation has begun to improve, but I think it'll take even bigger leaps in that technology before we can really start getting a handle on "the basics".
The important discovery here is not that the spleen has monocytes in it, because you do in fact see a ton of them when you look at splenic tissue under the microscope. The interesting thing about this discovery is that the spleen can (evidently) release a bunch of those cells in response to an injury. The bone marrow does this too, but the WBCs it releases are immature, and we know that there are changes in the way WBCs function as they age. It would appear that "spleen" WBCs are optimized for their tissue repair properties, while "bone marrow" WBCs are better for fighting infection.
It will be interesting to see if this holds true in humans. Lots of animals have spleens that seem more functional than ours. Cats and dogs, for example, can "transfuse" themselves with the blood from their spleen in response to bleeding, but this does not hold true for humans.
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?
For one thing, compared to what? As the article points out
Its such a vascularized organ, and the risk of big-time hemorrhaging is so great, that if the spleen ruptures, itâ(TM)s a surgical emergency,â said James N. George, a hematologist with the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center.
It's full of blood, if you thought you noticed a high amount of monocytes, you'd probably think: they're blood cells and the spleen is full of blood cells. The finding is, as I understand it, that BLOOD from the spleen is higher in monocytes. You'd have to compare blood from the spleen to blood circulating in other organs.
The other issue is that monocytes would be hard to specifically identify, and probably impossible to count in tissue slices. This page [profelis.org] has some examples of what monocytes look like when they're specifically stained (with hematoxylin and eosin I think), and what other blood cells look like. That's when they're stained just right and drawn out of an organ. If you're looking at slices of a spleen under a microscope, that's not going to jump out at you even if you were staining with H&E. The article used antibodies to specifically identify only monocytes. Antibodies recognize and can label specific proteins, they chose proteins that would be specific to monocytes. That's not something you do unless you're looking for monocytes specifically.
So you wouldn't notice monocytes unless you stained with antibodies specific to them, and even then, you wouldn't be able to compare them accurately in microscope sections.
FACS as I understand it (never done it myself, only heard about, and I'm not reading the real article too closely either) is where isolated cells one at a time are sprayed through a laser. If the cell has a fluroescent tag on it, that makes it deviate from the path it would take if it doesn't. You can collect cells that deviate and cells that don't, the machine counts them, and you can then compare the ratios (easier than counting in a microscope.) So they were able to use that to show it had a higher ratio.
Collecting blood from isolated tissues, prepping it with the antibodies for monocytes, prepping that for FACS and then actually doing FACS is not trivial, you're not going to be doing it unless you're specifically testing a hypothesis like the ones the authors had.
(disclaimer: I'm not an expert in spleens, immunology, or FACS and I didn't read either article in depth.)
But this doesn't explain why the spleen was so difficult: what would I see if I looked at a slide of spleen under the microscope (or if more advanced equipment than my eye and a microscope did the same thing)? If not a noticeably larger proportion of white blood cells than elsewhere, why not (e.g., did preparation destroy them, are the hidden or stored elsewhere, etc.)?
Clearly, something must have been going on for us not to have realized this sooner. (Or, perhaps, we've discovered only part of the story--i
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.
Dude what do you expect humans are still in an alpha release...If you want to know how it works your just going to have to read the code. They run pretty crappie because they are mainly a few hacks wrapped around bits and pieces cobbled together from other projects. The betas and the QA lab are still billions of years away. But trust me the new interface that's coming out is going to be sweet.
Unfortunately at the next major release they wipe the dev systems to clean out any faulty data. Sorry.
Little advertised fact about science is nearly everything should be appended with "... according to current models," but isn't. Because then it sounds like scientists don't know anything. Which they do know something, at least according to current models, but the truth is complicated and sells poorly.
Unfortunately, not enough scientists on the TV are this honest. Or they're not allowed to be. Whichever, it makes them look like chumps when they assuredly aren't.
What scientists on TV? I suspect that if there were more scientists on TV we wouldn't be having half of the anti-intellectualism fueled debates that rage these days.
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.
At first blush I'd want to question our supposed knowledge of those other heady areas of knowledge. Of course, that's not entirely the case. I'm partial to the book a Short History of Nearly Everything [wikipedia.org]. If nothing else, it will help you appreciate how we came by certain bits of knowledge while missing other things.
What we know are generalities. We know the Earth revolves around the sun and the moon revolves around the Earth via a mechanism called "gravity." Our knowledge of specifics is incomplete, to unstate the matter. We don't know what "gravity" actually is.
Ummm, yeah, we kinda do. That's what General Relativity is all about, actually. Gravity is a product of the geometry of the universe (or more specifically, space-time) distorting around the presence of mass. This distortion can also occur in the presence of r
AIDS is like a zombie virus, but for white blood cells, DoofusOfDeath. Unlike most viruses, it doesn't spread when the white blood cell explodes. The zombie white blood cell piles onto the healthy one and turns it into another of the infected. For more information, please direct the creators of Osmosis Jones [wikipedia.org] to create an R-rated sequel.
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
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:-)
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
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.
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.
It was the classic 'Oh shit, I've found a lump' moment. Actually it was 2 lumps, one in my neck, which I foolishly ignored for a month, then a lump in my armpit, on the same side, which combined with a bad night-sweat (waking up to soaked sheets at 4am) got the alarm bells going. (These are classic Hodgkins Lymphoma signs, it turns out).
The nasty thing about Hodgkins is that it is most prevalent in men in their mid 20's, just the age when you are least expecting out-of-the-blue health problems usually. It's pretty rare though at least, which is something. Plus I'm in the UK, free healthcare for all via the NHS, which encourages getting things checked out anyway I think.
That's rubbish! You're lying and we all know it. What really happened was you were put on a waiting list to receive your rationed treatment options or more likely told you were too old and would need to be euthanized. If you were in the US you'd be alive and in debt, just like God intended.
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.
From an evolutionary perspective its easier to leave no longer needed biological features in tact than it is to completely remove them. That is why creatures like snakes and whales have small remnants of legs.
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.
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 lo
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 hemispher
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.
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
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.
/I kind of forgot what I was typing about. //Going to bed... ///I dream of slashies
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'.:)
First Post (Score:2, Funny)
So how long are their deployments?
-US Army soldier.
Re:First Post (Score:5, Funny)
You fight disease with the spleen you have. Not the spleen you want.
Parent
Shakespeare by Internal Organ (Score:3, Interesting)
(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 [google.com]
How could the miss that? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Both are the sorts of organs we needed a long time ago, when infections and food poisoning would have been everyday occurrences, but not so much anymore. So it's no surprise that their functions aren't that obvious.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How could the miss that? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:How could the miss that? (Score:4, Funny)
If you persist with your LIES, you will be hearing from our lawyers.
Yours sincerely,
Yakult Honsha Co. Ltd
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"How could they miss that?"
Biologies obsession with vestigal organs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermiform_appendix#Vestigiality [wikipedia.org]
Early evolution theorists figured the body would have a lot of "vestigal" organs that did nothing, the same goes for junk dna
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junk_dna [wikipedia.org]
Re:How could the miss that? (Score:4, Insightful)
The ability to wiggle ones ears is a pretty good example, unless you can do it, you'd never appreciate the help that is in figuring out where sounds are coming from. Sure it's not as useful as it was. Well, scratch that, with all the randomly beeping things we have in the modern era it helps one figure out where they are hiding.
Parent
Re:How could the miss that? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
+1, Car analogy
Re:How could the miss that? (Score:5, Informative)
It will be interesting to see if this holds true in humans. Lots of animals have spleens that seem more functional than ours. Cats and dogs, for example, can "transfuse" themselves with the blood from their spleen in response to bleeding, but this does not hold true for humans.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:How could the miss that? (Score:5, Informative)
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?
For one thing, compared to what? As the article points out
Its such a vascularized organ, and the risk of big-time hemorrhaging is so great, that if the spleen ruptures, itâ(TM)s a surgical emergency,â said James N. George, a hematologist with the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center.
It's full of blood, if you thought you noticed a high amount of monocytes, you'd probably think: they're blood cells and the spleen is full of blood cells. The finding is, as I understand it, that BLOOD from the spleen is higher in monocytes. You'd have to compare blood from the spleen to blood circulating in other organs.
The other issue is that monocytes would be hard to specifically identify, and probably impossible to count in tissue slices. This page [profelis.org] has some examples of what monocytes look like when they're specifically stained (with hematoxylin and eosin I think), and what other blood cells look like. That's when they're stained just right and drawn out of an organ. If you're looking at slices of a spleen under a microscope, that's not going to jump out at you even if you were staining with H&E. The article used antibodies to specifically identify only monocytes. Antibodies recognize and can label specific proteins, they chose proteins that would be specific to monocytes. That's not something you do unless you're looking for monocytes specifically.
So you wouldn't notice monocytes unless you stained with antibodies specific to them, and even then, you wouldn't be able to compare them accurately in microscope sections.
In the real article [sciencemag.org], the authors seem to have used fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) [wikipedia.org] on spleen isolated blood to compare to circulating blood from other organs.
FACS as I understand it (never done it myself, only heard about, and I'm not reading the real article too closely either) is where isolated cells one at a time are sprayed through a laser. If the cell has a fluroescent tag on it, that makes it deviate from the path it would take if it doesn't. You can collect cells that deviate and cells that don't, the machine counts them, and you can then compare the ratios (easier than counting in a microscope.) So they were able to use that to show it had a higher ratio.
Collecting blood from isolated tissues, prepping it with the antibodies for monocytes, prepping that for FACS and then actually doing FACS is not trivial, you're not going to be doing it unless you're specifically testing a hypothesis like the ones the authors had.
(disclaimer: I'm not an expert in spleens, immunology, or FACS and I didn't read either article in depth.)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
But this doesn't explain why the spleen was so difficult: what would I see if I looked at a slide of spleen under the microscope (or if more advanced equipment than my eye and a microscope did the same thing)? If not a noticeably larger proportion of white blood cells than elsewhere, why not (e.g., did preparation destroy them, are the hidden or stored elsewhere, etc.)?
Clearly, something must have been going on for us not to have realized this sooner. (Or, perhaps, we've discovered only part of the story--i
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
What we don't know (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:What we don't know (Score:4, Funny)
Yet, somehow, we don't know the basic workings of our own bodies.
Proof that God is male- he ignores the concept of an instruction manual.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Unfortunately at the next major release they wipe the dev systems to clean out any faulty data. Sorry.
Re:What we don't know (Score:5, Insightful)
Little advertised fact about science is nearly everything should be appended with "... according to current models," but isn't. Because then it sounds like scientists don't know anything. Which they do know something, at least according to current models, but the truth is complicated and sells poorly.
Unfortunately, not enough scientists on the TV are this honest. Or they're not allowed to be. Whichever, it makes them look like chumps when they assuredly aren't.
Parent
Re:What we don't know (Score:4, Insightful)
scientists on the TV
What scientists on TV? I suspect that if there were more scientists on TV we wouldn't be having half of the anti-intellectualism fueled debates that rage these days.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
At first blush I'd want to question our supposed knowledge of those other heady areas of knowledge. Of course, that's not entirely the case. I'm partial to the book a Short History of Nearly Everything [wikipedia.org]. If nothing else, it will help you appreciate how we came by certain bits of knowledge while missing other things.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Ummm, yeah, we kinda do. That's what General Relativity is all about, actually. Gravity is a product of the geometry of the universe (or more specifically, space-time) distorting around the presence of mass. This distortion can also occur in the presence of r
HIV/AIDS (Score:2)
So what happens when someone has AIDS?
Are those monocytes sitting around doing nothing? Are they depleted? Something else?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
AIDS is like a zombie virus, but for white blood cells, DoofusOfDeath. Unlike most viruses, it doesn't spread when the white blood cell explodes. The zombie white blood cell piles onto the healthy one and turns it into another of the infected. For more information, please direct the creators of Osmosis Jones [wikipedia.org] to create an R-rated sequel.
No problem. (Score:5, Funny)
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.
There's somthing fishy (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
what idiot modded this insightful? it's a joke!
Modding jokes insightful is a subtle way for the mods to reward the poster of a clever joke with karma.
Splenectomy Patients (Score:5, Funny)
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 :-)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Change two letters in that sentence and he might get some play:
"I have had my spleen removed and may be subject to overwhelming affection."
C'mon, that's ancient Pimp right there.
(Or just really really cheesy and creepy, I haven't figured it out yet.)
i would imagine why the spleen seems useless (Score:5, Interesting)
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
And in Related News.. (Score:5, Informative)
No news yet on earlobes.
Re:And in Related News.. (Score:5, Funny)
Earlobes serve as a reservoir for gems and precious metals, in case of emergency financial distress.
Parent
Center of the Immune System (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Center of the Immune System (Score:4, Interesting)
It was the classic 'Oh shit, I've found a lump' moment. Actually it was 2 lumps, one in my neck, which I foolishly ignored for a month, then a lump in my armpit, on the same side, which combined with a bad night-sweat (waking up to soaked sheets at 4am) got the alarm bells going. (These are classic Hodgkins Lymphoma signs, it turns out).
The nasty thing about Hodgkins is that it is most prevalent in men in their mid 20's, just the age when you are least expecting out-of-the-blue health problems usually. It's pretty rare though at least, which is something. Plus I'm in the UK, free healthcare for all via the NHS, which encourages getting things checked out anyway I think.
Parent
Re:Center of the Immune System (Score:4, Funny)
That's rubbish! You're lying and we all know it. What really happened was you were put on a waiting list to receive your rationed treatment options or more likely told you were too old and would need to be euthanized. If you were in the US you'd be alive and in debt, just like God intended.
Parent
New? Again? (Score:4, Interesting)
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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You can lose a kidney [...] and they MUST have either had a use at one point or are meant for a very specific, yet seldom used task
Umm, I'm thinking you need to drink more fluids.
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Re:Makes Sense (Score:5, Informative)
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 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 lo
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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 hemispher
Re:Makes Sense (Score:5, Informative)
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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what you said is fine and good (Score:4, Informative)
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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IAAMS (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Not so much contamination; water & salt retent (Score:5, Interesting)
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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Some people even have more than two. My grandfather has a third, smaller kidney that is fully functional.
Re:Makes Sense (Score:4, Funny)
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