There's a small fatty gland that sits behind your sternum and is often said to be 'useless' in adulthood.
There's a small fatty gland that sits behind your sternum and is often said to be 'useless' in adulthood. Although not all scientists agree on this.
In a study in 2023, US researchers found that those who get their thymus removed face an increased risk of death from any cause in the five years following the surgery. If it isn't there, people's risk of dying and risk of cancer is at least double," Harvard University oncologist David ScaddenIn childhood, the thymus is known to play a critical role in developing the immune system.
When the gland is removed at a young age, patientsBy the time a person hits puberty, however, the thymus shrivels up and produces far fewer T cells for the body. It can seemingly be removed without immediate harm, and because it sits in front of the heart, it is often taken out during cardiothoracic surgery.
Using patient data from a state healthcare system, researchers in Boston compared the outcomes of patients who had undergone cardiothoracic surgery: more than 6,000 people who did not have their thymus removed and 1,146 people who did have their thymus removed. Those who underwent a thymectomy were almost twice as likely as controls to die within five years, even after accounting for sex, age, race, and those with cancer of the thymus, myasthenia gravis, or postoperative infections.
Patients who had their thymus removed were also twice as likely to develop cancer within five years of surgery. What's more, this cancer was generally more aggressive and often recurred after treatment compared to the control group. Why these associations exist is unknown, but researchers suspect a lack of thymus is somehow messing with the healthy function of the adult immune system.
A subset of patients in the study who had undergone a thymectomy showed fewer diverse T-cell receptors in their bloodwork, which could possibly contribute to the development of cancer or autoimmune diseases after surgery.
"Together, these findings support a role for the thymus contributing to new T-cell production in adulthood and to the maintenance of adult human health," the authors of the study Their results, they say, strongly suggest that the thymus plays a functionally important role in our continued health, right up to the bitter end.published in 2025 by researchers from the Yale School of Medicine sought to corroborate Scadden's team's findings, analyzing patient records in the National Cancer Database and the Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results database from 2004 to 2022. Ultimately, the Yale study could not find any evidence in their data that removing the thymus had a negative effect on patient health.
This suggests there's more we still need to unpack, to definitively understand what the consequences of thymus removal really are.
"Thymectomy in adults with small or localized thymomas was not associated with increased five-year mortality or cancer death," the teamAn earlier version of this article was first published in August 2023.
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