Gastric Mucosa and Cardiac Glands

00:00 Now, there's a fair bit of writing on this section, but I want you to focus really on a couple of major points that I'll describe. Have a look at the top of this slide and concentrate on the diagram showing the cardiac glands. I mentioned gastric glands before. Now I want to just briefly mention cardiac glands. And when I talk about these glands, I also refer to the pyloric glands down in the pyloric region of the stomach. These cardiac glands are in the cardio region of the stomach.

00:41 So the areas of the mucosa that are adjacent to the esophagus, and also in the case of the pyloric glands, they're adjacent to the pylorus. And in these two regions, as I indicated before when I was talking about the esophagus, basically, the glands are mucous secreting. And as you see in this little diagram, they are long simple coiled tubular glands. When you look across the right-hand side at the histological section, all you do is see profiles or all these glands, and you just see layers and layers and layers of cells, secretory cells.

01:28 Because these glands are so concentrated, you don't see them in this tubular form. You just see them as a sheath of cells, the sheath of secretory cells. The pyloric glands are very similar. Now these two glands secrete mucous, high amounts of mucous, again, to first of all neutralize any acid reflux into the esophagus, and also to neutralize any acid passing into the duodenum. And if you look carefully on the histological section, this is actually the junction between one of these areas of the cardiac glands and the main gastric glands, because if you look at the histological section on the far right of this section, you'll notice the sheath of cells that I spoke about is a bit paler staining than towards the left-hand side of that histological section where it begins to change to be gastric glandular tissue. The paler stained coloration refers to the mucous because the mucous is often lost during processing.