Lymphocytes are odd, special, and an amazing kind of cell.
They have their pathways in our bodies - the lymphatic vessels - where they casually travel with all accommodation to their specific organs.
Why are they so seldom, you say? Here is a list of a few things about them:
1. They travel to their specific organs: timus (primary lymphoid organ), spleen, lymph nodes, and MALT - mucosa-associated lymphoid tissue (secondary lymphoid organs).
2. They have their pathway in our bodies: the lymphatic vessels from the lymphatic system.
3. They do have an intense life. Their lifespan is only for a few weeks or months, appearing in the heat of a long-term immunologic battle, just to save the day.
4. Some selected group of the victorious lymphocytes remains in our bodies for years, in our version of “Valhalla” as we keep them as memory cells for further battles to come if we are facing the same antigens.
Our body is awesome.
As we can infer from our previous posts though, we know that these also have a dark side. It’s called “lymphoma”.
Lymphoma is lymphocyte-related cancer and, like myeloma, it results in our own body fighting itself.
There are many types of lymphoma, usually simplified on the categories of “Hodgkin lymphoma” and “non-Hodgkin lymphoma”.
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