Observing your navel: Checking your navel can tell you a lot about your health. (Representative)
Belly button, navel, inner or outer part… whatever term you use, your belly button can have a lot to tell you about your health status.
For some they are nightmares – omphalophobia (the fear of belly buttons) is a real condition. For others, they are a fashion accessory that can be displayed on a crop top or decorated with a body piercing.
Whatever your feelings about belly buttons, one thing is certain: it once united you with your mother. The umbilical cord is cut at birth, leaving only a small stump attached that progressively withers and falls off a week or two later.
What remains, in most cases, is a small wrinkled depression. That is if you have an “innie”, like most of us – 90% apparently – to do. From this point on, the belly button seems to become redundant – except to collect dust and fluff.
But that’s not all – your belly button has more depth than just a few millimeters.
The navel is an access point for the vessels that carry blood to and from the fetus. These come from the placenta and travel through the the umbilical cordcoated in Wharton’s Jelly – a gelatinous connective tissue contained in the cord that isolates and protects them.
There are normally three vessels within the medulla. The one that transports oxygen and nutrients to the fetus is the umbilical vein. It passes through the navel and feeds the developing fetal circulation. There are also two umbilical arteriesalthough these carry deoxygenated blood and waste, flowing in the other direction back to the placenta.
This circulation is not necessary after the baby is born and, once disconnected from the placenta, the umbilical vessels close naturally. But the small piece of cut cord may still be useful for a short time, especially in newborns who are unwell. Vessels may have inserted drip lines and be used for medication infusions, or collecting blood samples for testing.
The belly button is a portal in the wall of the abdomen – it is a little known fact that during embryonic development your intestines actually need leave your abdominal cavity because of limited space, but check back a few weeks later. They do this through the navel, passing into the umbilical cord.
As a result, the belly button is not just a hotspot, but a weak spot. One umbilical hernia occurs if a section of intestine passes through any gap. This may require an operation to correct it.
The nun and the navel
Poor Sister Mary Joseph Dempsey. She was a nun who dedicated much of her life to caring for patients at a hospital in Minnesota. She trained as a nurse, later becoming a surgical assistant to doctor William Mayo. It was during this tenure that she made an interesting observation.
At the time (late 19th century), cancers of the abdomen and pelvis were usually diagnosed much later and, unfortunately, were often more extensive. We call this process metastasiswhere the cancer starts in one organ or location and then spreads to another.
Mary Joseph observed that some patients with metastatic cancer had a new swelling or palpable nodule in the belly button. She did the noble act of reporting this to Mayo, who evidently hadn’t noticed. He went on to ignominiously publish these discoveries in his own name, without giving due credit to his esteemed colleague. It was only after the deaths of Dempsey and Mayo – both in 1939 – that another doctor, Hamilton Bailey, correctly named the discovery Sister Mary Joseph’s Lump.
O nodule It is firm, of variable color and, in fact, arises from the spread of cancer to the umbilical tissue. It is not seen as commonly today, since more cancers are now diagnosed earlier, before extensive spread occurs.
Medusa’s head
Other signs can be observed in the navel that have a basis in mythology. An example allows us to establish a connection between the liver and the navel.
The skin around the navel has layers of superficial veins that feed back deeper circulation. In fact, they drain blood into the hepatic portal vein, a large vessel that goes to the liver, full of nutrients absorbed from the intestine.
If the the pressure in the portal vein becomes very high (mainly as a result of liver diseases such as alcoholic cirrhosis), pressure also increases in the connecting vessels. Veins have thinner walls than arteries and tend to balloon under pressure.
As a result, the normally small veins around the navel dilate in size and become visible under the skin, spreading in all directions. This sign, like a head full of snakes in place of hair, is called medusa head, or the head of Medusa. In Greek mythology, the gorgon Medusa whose head was cut off by the hero Perseus, had the ability to turn anyone who caught his eye into stone.
And on that subject, all that dirt, debris, and dead skin in our belly buttons should also get an honorable (or perhaps dishonorable) mention—prolonged accumulation of this stuff inside the cavity can cause it to harden over time, forming a stony mass. We call this omphalolithor umbilical stone.
Therefore, the navel is a kind of reliable crystal ball in diagnosing internal diseases. But to know whether you find it an attractive part of your own anatomy, you have to ask: are you internal or external?
(Author:Dan BaumgardtSenior Professor, School of Physiology, Pharmacology and Neurosciences, University of Bristol)
(Disclosure statement:Dan Baumgardt does not work for, consult with, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations other than his academic appointment)
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