The Appendix: Useless or Helpful?

Rachel Hardin

According to an article on theGuardian.com, the appendix organ may not be as useless as most people think. In January of 2013, the Guardian published an article by Brian Clegg, giving 20 little-known facts about the human body. One of those facts makes a case for the appendix, the small organ that sits at the junction of the small intestine and the large intestine. The Guardian article says, “The appendix . . . [only seems to] occasionally get infected”. The author comes to the appendix’s defense, claiming that “the appendix is very useful”. Clegg makes the following claim:

“The appendix gets a bad press. It is usually treated as a body part that lost its function millions of years ago. All it seems to do is occasionally get infected and cause appendicitis. Yet recently it has been discovered that the appendix is very useful to the bacteria that help your digestive system function. They use it to get respite from the strain of the frenzied activity of the gut, somewhere to breed and help keep the gut's bacterial inhabitants topped up. So treat your appendix with respect.”

But is this idea accurate, and is there evidence to support it? Does the appendix actually have a purpose, or is it the body’s least useful organ?

As evidence to support its claim, the article sites another piece from the Guardian by Robin McKie. McKie’s article features the ideas of one Bill Parker, an assistant professor of experimental surgery at Duke University medical centre, in Durham, North Carolina. “In effect,” McKie’s article says, “the much-reviled organ is really a sanctuary for helpful microbes”. The appendix, according to Parker, is actually a “storehouse”, a place for good bacteria to cultivate.

Parker presented this idea about the appendix in 2007. Since that time, researchers have been trying to find evidence to support his claim. According to McKie’s article, a group led by Jeames Grendell has now revealed that it has found intriguing evidence that suggests Parker may be correct. The team at Winthrop-University hospital on Long Island studied about 250 patients, all of whom had histories of gut infections that were caused by a bacterium called Clostridium difficile. The bacterium is a deadly pathogen often encountered in hospitals among patients who have been put on prolonged courses of antibiotics. The prolonged treatments of antibiotics causes the benign bacteria in a patients’ gut to be depleted, and Clostridium difficile takes over.

According to Parker’s theory, patients who did have an appendix would be less likely than those without one to have recurrences of Clostridium difficile, because the appendix would help give the patients’ body’s benign bacteria with which their guts could replenish and which would help keep the bad bacterium away.

McKie’s article reports that such results are exactly the results that Grendell's group found. They discovered that the patients who did not have an appendix were more than twice as likely to have a recurrence of Clostridium difficile infections. The recurrence in individuals who did have their appendix happened in 18% of the cases. Recurrence in the patients without their appendix intact occurred in 45% of cases.

Creation.com says that since 1976, the appendix has been believed to have purpose, when the medical journal Gastroenterology said, “The appendix is not generally credited with significant function; however, current evidence tends to involve it in the immunologic mechanism.” Although evidence of the appendix’s usefulness has existed for so long, it’s rare to meet a person who could actually tell you what that function is. The Creation.com article attributes such ignorance to school teaching, where many people are still told that the appendix lost its function centuries ago.

The science journal Scientific American published a piece that asks the question, “What is the function of the human appendix? Did it once have a purpose that has since been lost?” To which Loren G. Martin, professor of physiology at Oklahoma State University, replies, “We now know . . . that the appendix serves an important role in the fetus and in young adults. Endocrine cells appear in the appendix of the human fetus at around the 11th week of development. These endocrine cells of the fetal appendix have been shown to produce various biogenic amines and peptide hormones, compounds that assist with various biological control (homeostatic) mechanisms.”

“Far from being useless,” says Dr. Edward Group in an article on GlobalHealingCenter.com, “the appendix may produce and protect beneficial probiotic colonies in the digestive system.” Researchers have found that the human digestive system is full of good bacteria that’s necessary to digest food. When they are attacked by diseases, sometimes these bacteria are killed. In situations like these, the appendix acts as a reserve for more good bacteria. After the immune system purges the disease, the bacteria emerge from the appendix and re-colonize the gut.

An article from HumansAreFree.com says that “following a severe bout of cholera or dysentery, which can purge the gut of bacteria essential for digestion, the appendix acts as a reserve for good bacteria to emerge.” Although, the article goes on to say that such evidence “does not mean we should cling to our appendices at all costs.” According to Bill Parker, “It’s very important for people to understand that if their appendix gets inflamed, just because it has a function it does not mean they should try to keep it in.”

It can be easy to dismiss the appendix as useless because, unlike feeling a heartbeat or a full stomach, most people’s only identifiable interaction with the appendix is a painful one. Unlike the heart or the stomach, the appendix’s purpose cannot be observed or deduced by simple means, but it is an organ we can live without. The appendix is not just a piece of tissue whose purpose has been lost through centuries of evolution. Based on the given evidence, we see that Brian Clegg in the original Guardian article was correct and accurate when he claimed that the appendix does have a function.