SHOTS HEALTH NEWS – It was the first day of spring break in 1992 in Phoenix, Ariz. and 12-year-old Heather Smith was excited for her family’s upcoming ski trip
But before Smith and her family had even packed their snow pants, she realized she didn’t feel good.
“I woke up feeling just a little bit nauseous and I wasn’t sure why. Throughout the course of the day, I started to feel worse and worse, and started to develop pain in the abdomen,” she says.
By about mid-afternoon, her father took her to urgent care. She ended up getting emergency surgery to have her appendix out.
Smith still has a small scar from the appendectomy. And after the surgery, she found herself intrigued by the part of her body she had so suddenly lost. “It inspired me to wonder – why do we have this weird little organ in the first place? What does it do? Why does it get inflamed?”
Smith grew up to be a professor of anatomy at Midwestern University and editor-in-chief of a journal called The Anatomical Record.
And all these decades later, Smith has made a mark in the field by studying the very organ that threw off her family’s vacation plans in 1992.
She acknowledges the appendix has a bad rap as a useless organ that can cause you pain and require emergency surgery. “But it turns out recent research shows it does have functions that can help us,” she says …
It turns out that the appendix appears to have two related functions. The first function is supporting the immune system. The appendix has a high concentration of immune tissue, so it’s acting to help the immune system fight any bad things in the gut.
The second function that it serves is what we refer to as the safe house. So this was a hypothesis that was put forward by a team from Duke University in 2007. And they argued that the appendix may serve as a safe reservoir for the beneficial gut bacteria …
