Where is carotid body

Edit article. View revision history Report problem with Article. Citation, DOI and article data. Jones, J. Carotid body. Reference article, Radiopaedia. URL of Article. Related pathology carotid body tumor carotid body paraganglioma. Atlas of anatomy. George Thieme Verlag. Read it at Google Books - Find it at Amazon. Related articles: Anatomy: Head and neck. However, the Belgian group of physiologists did not directly focus their studies on the function of the carotid body and they took years to abandon their hypothesis that the respiratory reflex originated in the carotid sinus.

However, while they cited the work of De Castro among the reference, they did not discuss his studies in the text Heymans and Bouckaert, ; Heymans et al. This is likely to be the origin entirely or in part of the persistent failure to differentiate between the anatomical sites at which blood pressure and its composition are detected Gallego, In , Corneille Heymans was invited by Professor Puche to give some conferences in Barcelona and to perform different exhibitions of his experiments at the University.

To take advantage of this trip, Heymans wrote to De Castro to arrange a visit to the Cajal Institute in Madrid as he wanted to complete their scientific discussion held at Ghent the year before Figure 4 C. Thus, it is not by chance that Heymans and his group published a study in devoted to the study of bradycardia induced by different drugs in which they explicitly accepted the hypothesis of De Castro on the chemoreceptor nature of the carotid body:.

Perhaps even more explicit is the reference published in a second paper on the same subject a year later:.

Coinciding with the second visit of De Castro to the Pharmacological Institute at the University of Ghent where he repeated experiments on dogs together with Heymans; Figure 4 B , the Belgian physio-pharmacologists once and for all adopted the hypothesis of De Castro about the existence of chemoreceptors in the carotid body to detect chemical variations in the composition of blood. Accordingly, they then began to study the region of the glomus caroticum with greater impetus and the physiological importance of its chemoreceptors:.

Shortly after, Heymans brought together all the discoveries published by his group in a book Heymans et al. In this text, a complete scenario of the different types of cardio-respiratory reflexes was profiled and the authors reflected that changes in arterial pressure detected by the baroreceptors from the carotid sinus or in the chemical composition of blood detected by the chemoreceptors of the glomus caroticum or carotid body control respiratory frequency, heart rate and arterial pressure.

From this year on, Heymans and his collaborators will cite this compilation and less frequently their initial publications on the subject , , , At this time, De Castro was using complex and sometimes indirect surgical approaches to experimentally demonstrate that the neurons of the glomus respond to changes in the chemical composition of blood.

For this purpose, he developed different anastomosis between the glossopharyngeal, vagus and hypoglossal nerves to create artificial reflex arches, and they required the prior and detailed study of the regeneration of the sectioned preganglionic branches. These studies De Castro, , , , , necessary to demonstrate the physiological role of arterial chemoreceptors, distracted Fernando de Castro from his original goal by raising other scientific questions, which led him to work with the world famous and reputed biologist Giusseppe Levi at Turin Italy , both in and particularly in Is it possible that these parabiosis experiments, similar to those performed by the Heymans and by De Castro and Heymans, in Ghent see above , were those he referred to at the end of his work published in see above.

In Febraury, De Castro went to Turin to work with Levi, and there his life ran a serious risk due to a rare gastric haemorrhage. Cajal died in October , when De Castro had returned to Madrid, provoking organizational changes at the Cajal Institute. However, at this time the political and social events in Spain and other European countries became more and more complicated, leading to the start of the Spanish Civil War in July Two direct collaborators of the Belgian physio-pharmacologists, Professor Liljestrand member of the committee and Ulf von Euler a Nobel Prize winner in evaluated the candidature of Heymans 12 , and they left this testimony in the records of the Nobel Foundation regarding the prize for Physiology or Medicine:.

In , the reviewer exposed some doubts about his qualification for a prize like this, taken into account the obvious analogy with previous research performed on the aortic nerves and those from their predecessors mentioned above [Pagano, Siciliano, Sollmann y Brown]; afterwards, it was considered the division of the prize between Hering and Heymans, but the Committee was still sceptic about the merits of the first one.

In fact, when consulting the Nobel Foundation database, it can be seen that the Austro-German physiologist Heinrich Hering was proposed for the prize in , and , as well as sharing a nomination with the Louis Lapique and Corneille Heymans in The case of Heymans merits certain attention because he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in , , when it was awarded to him and also in But, only in the proposals from and is there an explicit mention of his studies on the baro- and chemoreceptors of the blood, while on the previous occasions he was nominated for his studies on blood circulation in general.

It also seems interesting that while he was nominated by the Hungarian professor Mansfeld in , on all the other occasions he was supported by Belgian professors and physicians, including the deluge of proposals supporting his candidature in either alone or sharing nomination with Louis Lapique and Walter Hess. So, what about De Castro? Once again, the database of the Nobel Foundation is clear which opens all its documents to the public 50 years after the concession of each Prize : nobody, either from Spain or from any other country, nominated Fernando De Castro for the Nobel Prize in those years After carefully studying the database of the Nobel Foundation, it can be seen that Cajal supported only one nomination during his lifetime together with another eight Spanish scientists and medical doctors and that he did not lead the proposal: that of the French immunologist Richet in It remains a mystery that during the 28 years after he was awarded the Nobel prize and as active and influential as he was until close to his death in , the Spanish genius did not participate in these scientific jousts.

The draft written by De Castro to congratulate Heymans in receiving the Nobel prize, dated December 15th , is conserved in his archives, as is the hand-written reply from the Nobel Prize dated December 29th of the same year Figure 5 A. In the trail of the physiological studies of the Ghent group, Comroe discovered the chemoreceptors in the so called glomus aorticum innervated by the depressor nerves , which fulfilled a minor role in the respiratory reflexes because they only respond to extreme cases of hypoxemia Comroe, Figure 5.

A Letter from Heymans, dated 29th December , in response to a previous letter from Fernando De Castro dated 15th December where he congratulated the Belgian physio-pharmacologist for the award of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. B Picture of the portrait of Corneille Heymans, dedicated to De Castro see hand-writing in blue at the bottom-right corner of the image ; Fernando De Castro kept this dedicated picture on his bureau until he died in C De Castro prepared to perform one of his famous and complicated nerve anastomosis in a cat; note the precarious conditions of his laboratory in Madrid circa Liljestrand recognised the work of Fernando De Castro as fundamental in the path that Heymans followed towards his final success:.

The glomus consists of a small mass of very fine intertwining vessels arising from the internal carotid and enclosing various different types of cells. It has been considered by some as being a sort of endocrine gland similar to the medulla of the suprarenal glands.

De Castro, however, in demonstrated that the anatomy of the glomus could in no way be compared to that of the suprarenal medulla. De Castro suggested rather that the glomus was an organ whose function was to react to variations in the composition of the blood, in other words an internal gustatory organ with special «chemo-receptors».

In , Bouckaert, Dautrebande, and Heymans undertook to find out whether these supposed chemo-receptors were responsible for the respiratory reflexes produced by modifications in the composition of the blood. By localized destruction in the sinus area they had been able to stop reflexes initiated by pressure changes, but respiratory reflexes could still continue to occur in answer to changes in the composition of the blood.

It was then surprising that he barely cited the previous work of Fernando De Castro:. Bouckaert and L. When asked both indirectly and directly by the interviewer if he could explain why Cornelius Heymans did not share the Nobel Prize he received in with him, Fernando De Castro explained:.

Obviously, there was a tremendous loss of time from to due to the war and because at that time I was performing the experiments on nervous anastomosis. This was to automatically register the phenomenon of the carotid reflexes on the eye, with the nervous anastomosis detecting chemical changes in the blood. Years after, I presented this work in a symposium held at Stockholm, in which the opening conference was entrusted to Heymans and the second to me.

I had no more cats during that difficult time, they died of hungry or I was forced to sacrifice them. In this respect, the Chilean scientist Juan de Dios Vial, who worked with De Castro in the fifties, published interesting comments on this chapter of the life of the Spanish neuroscientis:.

This may be due to the fact that his contribution was widely ignored as coming from Spain. Vial, How can we define the situation of the subject today? It is generally accepted that this nerve is a branch of the glossopharyngeal nerve, single or double bundled, composed by fibres from the baroreceptors located in the wall of the carotid sinus and the fibres from the chemoreceptors placed in the carotid body.

Minor contingents of fibres of this nerve belong to the sympathetic trunk and vagus nerve in variable number Williams and Warwick, A significant degree of variability in the innervation of the carotid body has been described with modern histological techniques and in different species McDonald, ; Ichikawa, ; Milsom and Burleson, A recent study on the innervation of the human carotid body confirms this heterogeneity and variability Toorop et al.

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Fernando de Castro is the only grandson of Fernando De Castro, one of the characters of the present work. I am in debt with Dr. Javier Arenzana by his help on preparing the high-resolution figures for this paper. All the original drawings, letters and photographs used in this article belong to the Fernando De Castro Archives. Ernst became professor of anatomy and physiology in Leipzig University in and worked in the nervous system and special senses.

Eduard Weber became also professor in at Leipzig, and his most relevant contribution was the experiments on the vagus nerve referred here. This was the first Nobel prize devoted to Neurosciences. This commentary referred to the fact that Madrid was sieged and in the front line most of the duration of the Spanish Civil War July April Thus, life in these countries would have been relatively normal in January , which permitted this ceremony to be celebrated.

However, these circumstances delayed holding the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm for 6 years. Heymans Ghent, Belgium; January 16th, Heymans Stockholm, Sweden; December 12th, Comroe, J.

The location and function of the chemoreceptors of the aorta. Cyon, E. De Castro, F. Some of them require your consent. Click on a category of cookies to activate or deactivate it. These are cookies that ensure the proper functioning of the website and allow its optimization detection of navigation problems, connection to your IMAIOS account, online payments, debugging and website security.

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