It's not new, and it's probably not an organ (it's not a contiguous structure). People have been publishing work on interstitial tissues for a long time now.
Matthew R. Glucksberg, a professor of biomedical engineering at Northwestern University, said he did research on interstitial mechanics back in the 1990s. "This publication would have been baffling back then, let alone now," he said in an email. "We know a lot about the interstitium and know it is not an organ."
"An apt analogy might be a research team that buys an expensive telescope, looks at a point between Mars and Jupiter, sees the asteroid belt, and then announce that they have discovered a planet that no one has ever seen before," he said. "We know a lot about the asteroid belt and know that it is not a planet."
Thanks for posting that. A a pathologist who spends several hours a day looking at this stuff under a microscope (including occasional frozen sections) I was mainly impressed by the authors' ability to make the routine sound new. Welcome to the Buzzfeed generation?
It really annoys me that these articles spread like wildfire... I read it and was like no way did I read that right... Just no way. Not sure why Google likes promoting this kind of story (entirely fictional) especially when it comes to science and biology.
No the reason is that an epidural affects the sympathetic nervous system which among other things is responsible for blood vessel tone. Without the tone, the capacitance of the blood vessels goes up and blood can pool in these blood vessels reducing blood pressure. Tilting can help more blood get to the heart and brain.
I’m not a medical professional, but my understanding is that an “epidural” is an injection of an anaesthetic drug (by catheter) into the epidural space. That is, the spinal canal, where the spinal cord and spinal fluid reside. The drug has a higher specific gravity than the cerebrospinal fluid, so it descends in the canal and anesthetizes the nerves along the way.
If you had an epidural while upside down, it could eventually reach your brain.
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[ 8.1 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadMatthew R. Glucksberg, a professor of biomedical engineering at Northwestern University, said he did research on interstitial mechanics back in the 1990s. "This publication would have been baffling back then, let alone now," he said in an email. "We know a lot about the interstitium and know it is not an organ."
"An apt analogy might be a research team that buys an expensive telescope, looks at a point between Mars and Jupiter, sees the asteroid belt, and then announce that they have discovered a planet that no one has ever seen before," he said. "We know a lot about the asteroid belt and know that it is not a planet."
https://www.buzzfeed.com/theresatamkins/science-new-organ-di...
https://www.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/jappl.1989.67.2.8...
If you had an epidural while upside down, it could eventually reach your brain.