Where the nodes gather
An adult has several hundred lymph nodes, and nearly all lymph passes through at least one before it reaches the blood. The nodes gather in chains along the large vessels: in the neck beside the jugular veins, in the armpit, in the groin, along the aorta and in the mesentery of the gut.
The regions where lymph nodes gather, as doctors map them: neck, armpit, chest, abdomen beside the aorta, mesentery, pelvis, groin and behind the knee, after SEER Training, U.S. National Cancer InstituteWikimedia Commons, Fred the Oyster after SEER Training, U.S. National Cancer Institute, Public domain (Lymph node regions.svg)
In the neck, the armpit and the groin the nodes lie close under the skin, which is why a doctor feels there for swollen ones. A healthy node is soft and smaller than a centimetre. A node that turns hard and fixed can mean a cancer that has spread to it.
Sources
- Susan Standring (ed.), Gray's Anatomy, 42nd ed. (2020), ch. 6.
- Henry Gray, Anatomy of the Human Body, 20th ed. (1918), section VIII, The Lymphatic System.
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