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New Research Suggests the Appendix Has a Purpose After All

Slashdot: Science - Fetched: January 11th, 2017, 5:00pm UTC

The appendix is an organ thought to have gone the way of our wisdom teeth and body hair: At one point we all needed them, now people can get by just fine without them. However, it turns out, at least the appendix has some purpose in the body. From a report: Scientists, though, have never been certain what the appendix used to do -- and if it is still, in fact, useless. On Jan. 9, a team of researchers led by scientists at Midwestern University Arizona College of Osteopathic Medicine published a review study proposing an answer: the appendix is a secondary immune function that both catalyzes immune cell responses and floods your gut with beneficial bacteria when they've been depleted. And it still plays that role, in a limited fashion, in human body function."We can function okay without it, but the appendix does provide some degree of immunity and beneficial bacteria,#226; Heather Smith, an anatomist and lead author of the paper said.pdiv class="share_submission" style="position:relative;" a class="slashpop" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=New+Research+Suggests+the+Appendix+Has+a+Purpose+After+All%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F2ikLOlI"img src="https://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a a class="slashpop" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fscience.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F17%2F01%2F11%2F2016237%2Fnew-research-suggests-the-appendix-has-a-purpose-after-all%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook"img src="https://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a class="nobg" href="http://plus.google.com/share?url=https://science.slashdot.org/story/17/01/11/2016237/new-research-suggests-the-appendix-has-a-purpose-after-all?utm_source=slashdotamp;utm_medium=googleplus" onclick="javascript:window.open(this.href,'', 'menubar=no,toolbar=no,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,height=600,width=600');return false;"img src="http://www.gstatic.com/images/icons/gplus-16.png" alt="Share on Google+"//a /div/ppa href="https://science.slashdot.org/story/17/01/11/2016237/new-research-suggests-the-appendix-has-a-purpose-after-all?utm_source=rss1.0moreanonamp;utm_medium=feed"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~4/plztPrElnYA" height="1" width="1" alt=""/

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