End organ

The term end organ or end-organ has two meanings in medicine:

• A small organ at the terminal end of a nerve conduction pathway
  • Bulbous corpuscle (Ruffini corpuscle end-organ)
  • Tactile corpuscle (Meissner corpuscle end-organ)
  • Merkel nerve ending (Merkel corpuscle end-organ)
  • Neuromuscular junction (motor end-organ)
  • Lamellar corpuscle (Pacinian corpuscle end-organ)
• The ultimately affected organ in a chain of events, such as a disease process (pathophysiology) or a drug's mechanism of action (sometimes called a target organ in this sense)
  • • End organ damage, disease of such organs
      • Ambulatory blood pressure § Target organ damage
      • Sepsis § End-organ dysfunction
      • HFE hereditary haemochromatosis § End-organ damage