The mesentery’s purpose isn’t fully understood, but its presence could hold the key to treating digestive diseases. It was previously thought that the organ was an unimportant group of structures, but it has now been classified as one single organ, which connects the abdomen to the intestine. The discovery that the mesentery was a single structure was first made by Irish researcher J Calvin Coffey at University Hospital Limerick in Ireland in 2012. Since then, he and his team studied the mesentery to prove it should be classified as an organ. "When we approach it like every other organ,” Coffey...
