Sensing pain—A newly discovered organ

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https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/08/newly-discovered-organ-may-be-lurking-uinder-your-skin-senses-pain/

Dubbed the nociceptive glio-neural complex, this structure is not quite like the typical picture of a complex organ like the heart or the spleen. Instead, it’s a simple organ made up of a network of cells called glial cells, which are already known to surround and support the body’s nerve cells. In this case, the glial cells form a mesh-like structure between the skin’s outer and inner layers, with filament-like protrusions that extend into the skin’s outer layer.

 

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“We have been thinking for probably a hundred years that pain is started from nerves in the skin,” says study coauthor

Patrik Ernfors, a molecular neurobiologist at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. “But what we show now is that pain can also be started in these glial cells.”