Dr. Sagen Zac-Varghese

And the parathyroid glands have been taken out because they've been stuck buried down into the thyroid.

So it's possible to get hypoparathyroidism.

And it's really interesting in terms of the treatment for hypoparathyroidism.

We give people calcium and active vitamin D.

So what's really interesting is you need parathyroid hormone to activate that last step of vitamin D in the kidney.

So if you don't have parathyroid hormone, you make far less active vitamin D. So in people who have kidney failure or people who don't have parathyroid glands, we give them activated vitamin D.

If you go back millions of years, so animals living in the sea surrounded by calcium, they can get calcium in and out through the gills very easily.

No problems for those animals getting calcium in and out.

That's it, exactly.

And then what's really interesting about the parathyroid hormone is it's thought that the parathyroid glands developed almost 375 million years ago.

Right.

And it's thought to be one of the reasons that animals were able to evolve from an aquatic to a terrestrial environment, so moving from the sea to the land.

So when they've looked back at the gills of fish and parathyroglans, they've got some common genes and they're thought to have a common evolutionary basis.

So it's a really important hormone that defends our calcium levels.

Yeah.

Yes.

So that's a really good question.

So the genes that are associated with the evolution of internal gills and the genes that are associated with parathyroid glands are very similar.

And this was found by researchers at King's College.

They looked at genes and they looked at the evolution of those genes.