In the center of the chest, just behind the breastbone, hides a small gland that has been systematically ignored by medicine when it comes to adult health: the thymus. For a long time, textbooks have taught that this organ is vital in childhood to develop the immune system, but that it later atrophies and turns into fat as we grow. But its role in the long run is not as irrelevant as we thought.
A turnaround. The paradigm that we were all taught at school has taken a big turn through a publication in Nature that has shown that the health of the thymus in adulthood not only matters, but is a determining factor in predicting how long we will live, the state of our cardiovascular health and also how we will respond to cancer.
How it has been seen. The premise of this interesting study lies in a simple observation about people who did not have a thymus because it had been removed and the increase in mortality from all causes compared to those who have a healthy thymus. From here, a research team wanted to understand the true impact of a “sleeping” organ through different CT scans to calculate the thymic health of different people.
The system analyzed the images of numerous people, including data from the National Lung Screening Trialwhich had more than 25,000 patients. When crossing the state of the thymus with the medical history and longevity of each individual, the results were so overwhelming that the researchers themselves confessed that it was the first time they had seen such spectacular results, since no one expected such a small organ to have so much clinical impact.
Reduces mortality. This study has intensively analyzed the function of this gland in large groups of adults to discover that maintaining good thymic health is directly associated with lower overall mortality. But surprisingly, the study links having a healthy thymus with a lower incidence of cardiovascular mortality
In oncology. This is where the finding takes on a revolutionary clinical dimension, since the data show a clear correlation between a healthy thymus and a lower incidence of lung cancer. But we can go further by pointing out that patients who undergo immunotherapy and have a healthy thymus respond greatly to the treatment, and even have a lower risk of suffering from cancer again.
Preventive medicine. With this evidence, “thymic health” is positioned to become a very important parameter in the field of personalized medicine to gain insight into how a patient may accept a treatment. But in addition, monitoring its degradation could allow medicine to anticipate autoimmune diseases in those people who already have a higher risk.
Images | kjpargeter in Magnific
In | There are people who are 100 years old, but have an immune system of 30: a new study reveals how they manage to avoid cancer
