Medical researchers have made an astonishing anatomical discovery, discovering what a mysterious mass of salivary glands hidden inside the human brain looks like – something that has been missing from scientists for centuries.
This “unknown entity” was identified by accident from doctors in the Netherlands who were examining patients with prostate cancer with an advanced type of scan called PSMA PET / CT. When paired with an injection of radioactive glucose, this diagnostic tool highlights tumors in the body.
In this case, however, it showed something else in the back of the nasopharynx, and something else that had long resided in the lumber.
(Walstar et al., Radiotherapy and oncology, 2020)
Formation of tubercle glands indicated by blue arrows along with other major salivary glands of orange.
“People have three sets of large salivary glands, but there aren’t,” explains Wauter Vogel, a radiation oncologist at the Cancer Institute in the Netherlands.
“As far as we know, only the saliva or mucous glands in the nasopharynx are microscopically small, and about 1000 are evenly distributed throughout the mucosa. So, imagine our surprise when we found this.”
The salivary glands are the ones that produce saliva to function for our digestive system, in which most of the fluid is produced in three large salivary glands, known as the parotid, submandibular and sublingual glands.
There are also about 1000 small salivary glands, located around the oral cavity and the aerodigital tract, but these are usually too small to see without a microscope.
The new discovery by Vogel’s team is much larger, showing a previously neglected pair of glands – apparently a fourth group of major salivary glands – located behind the nose and above the palm, near the center of the human head.
“The two new areas published also have other characteristics of the salivary glands,” says the first author of a study by Thijus Walstar, an oral surgeon at the University of Amsterdam. “
“We call them tuber glands by reference to their anatomical location [above the torus tubarius]”
These tubercle glands were found to exist in the PSMA PET / CT scan of all 100 patients examined in the study, and physical examination of the two cadres – one male and one female – also showed a mysterious bilateral structure, showing a macroscopically visible drain. Towards the nasopharyngeal wall.
“To the best of our knowledge, this design did not match previous body descriptions,” the researchers explained in their paper.
“It was speculated that it may contain a large number of Seromax acini, with a physiological role for nasopharynx / oropharynx lubrication and swallowing.”
For how the glands were not previously identified, the researchers suggest that formations under the base of the skull are found in poorly accessible anatomical locations, making them difficult to tighten endoscopically. It is possible, he says, that attention has been paid to the opening of the ducts, but they may not have been noticed for what they are because they are part of a larger glandular system.
Tubercle glands. (Netherlands Cancer Institute)
Additionally, it is only new PSMA-PET / CT imaging techniques that will be able to detect the formation of salivary glands beyond the visualization capabilities of technologies such as ultrasound, CT and MRI scans.
While the team acknowledges that additional research on a larger, more diverse group will be needed to validate their findings, they say that research during radiation treatment for cancer patients gives us another goal to avoid, as the salivary glands are very sensitive to damage. Healing.
Preliminary data – based on a previous analysis of 723 patients undergoing radiation treatment – concluded that the conclusion reached in the region of the tubercle glands seems to support radiation, then more difficulties for patients: the result, which can not only benefit future oncology, but also. Strengthen the case that these mysterious, neglected structures are actually salivary glands.
“It looks like they may be on something,” said Valerie Fitzug, a pathologist at Rutgers University who was not involved in the study. The New York Times.
“If it’s real, it could change the way we look at disease in this area.”
These findings are reported Radiotherapy and oncology.
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