A strange lump near the heart’s node raised the alarm. 🫀
The forensic examiners were examining the body of a man who had died after a fight involving a bladed weapon, with a wound that perforated a pulmonary vein. But when they dissected his heart, they found something that should not have been there: a strange lump next to the atrioventricular node. When they cut the tissue into thin sections for analysis, a boomerang-shaped piece of bone appeared, about the size of a black bean.
They call it ‘os cordis’, a heart bone that until now had only been documented in animals such as cows and camels, never with certainty in an adult human heart. The man had a slightly enlarged heart and moderate coronary artery disease, leading researchers to think that this structure could be more closely linked to age and disease than previously believed. A specialist named Trainini, who has already examined nearly 100 human hearts, suspects that we might all have something similar hidden in there. 😳