Thursday, February 26, 2015
Wrinkles Causes And arresting
HUMAN BODY ANATOMY ORGANS :
Aging is an inevitable process that the human body experiences. The skin, like any other organ, experiences the deleterious effects of time. But unlike others, these disorders are visible to everybody around us. Moreover, the skin can show the signs of diseases of other organs by excreting their toxins.
Wrinkles: Causes And arresting
Our appearance plays a major role in our group relations, the way we feel about ourselves, and in the way others picture us. Therefore, it is important to take good care of our skin to delay any signs of aging.
Skin Anatomy
In order to determine preventive measures, you should first understand the structure and the roles of your skin as well as the military which harm it.
The largest organ you have is your skin and its main function is to be a protective barrier against environmental factors, such as injuries, infections, sun rays, and harmful substances.
In addition, the skin has a lot of specialized cells and structures which get data from the surface and send it to the brain to process and regulate the behavior of the whole body.
The skin is made up of 3 layers:
- the epidermis, an outer thin layer containing assorted types of epithelial cells along with cells that yield the skins pigment (melanin), cells that play an important defensive role (Langerhans cells), and Merkels cells which function as sensitive receptors.
- the dermis, which is the thickest one, containing a network of elastin, collagen and reticular fibers surrounding blood vessels, nerves, muscles, sweat cells, and hair follicles with oil-producing and apocrine cells. At this level there are also nerve cells serving as receptors for temperature, touch and pain.
- and ultimately is the subcutaneous tissue, composed mostly of fatty cells, which have a resistance role.
Wrinkle Formation
As time passes, your skin changes. It becomes loose, thinner, drier and wrinkled, and slower to heal. The wrinkles occur generally as a supervene of the rupture of the elastin fibers and the decreasing yield of collagen fibers in the epidermis but the diminishing of the fatty cells play a role in this as well as the decreasing bonds in the middle of the epidermis and dermis.
The main factors that yield or accelerate the damage are: sunlight, smoking, pollution, muscle use, inadequate diet, genetic background, and the lowering of hormonal levels at menopause.
Sunlight (the Uv rays actually) damages the collagen and elastin fibers, and causes the improvement of some abnormal elastin fiber types. This results in a looseness of the skin and its inability to retract after stretching, causing the formation of wrinkles. It additional produces a higher rate of evaporation, development skin drier.
Thus it is advisable at any age to avoid sunlight at midday and normally use sunscreen creams with Spf 15 or higher. In addition, you should drink a lot of water, about 50-60 ounces daily. This water intake is also helpful in eliminating toxins through urine, rather than through skin pores.
Smoking and other air polluting factors yield free radicals in the cells of the skin, altering these cells and their genetic material. It is important to emphasize the significance of quiting smoking because smokers get wrinkled at an younger age than non-smokers, directly proportional to the years and the whole of cigarettes smoked daily.
Wrinkle stoppage And Treatments
Researchers have found that many dietary factors can play a role in aging of the skin. It is highly recommended that you contain antioxidants in your diet, such as vitamin C, A, D, E, and beta carotene.
There are a lot of healing and surgical treatments for removing the signs of aging from the skin. But why wait until you get a problem, when you can do something about it now? Preventing is best than curing.
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Digestion and Respiration
Male and Female Reproductive Systems
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
Learning about Rock Groups and The Rock Cycle
We started our learning by reading The Magic School Bus Rocky Road Trip Chapter Book. As we read this book, we learnt about different famous rock structure such as The Grand Canyon as well as Uluru (Ayers Rock). We later completed a lap book based on this book (details at the end of this post).
We continued our learning about rocks by going rock collecting. We collected different rocks from a few different locations and looked at the differences between them. We found that the rock we had collected from the beach we smooth and round due to the weathering from the waves where as the rocks we found near a lake were very sharp and rough.
We talked about the effects that weathering and erosion has on rocks and soil and how it helps rocks change. We watched this short YouTube clip on weathering and erosion to helped with our understanding and learning. We then started looking at the three different groups of rocks. I purchased this little rock kit from scholastic that has two samples of rocks from each of the three different rock groups. This gave us an idea of the different groups we were about to learn about.
Igneous Rock
Sedimentary Rock
Metamorphic Rock
The Rock Cycle
Lap book
Male nipples and round ligaments of the uterus
In men, however, the nipples serve no obvious function. They certainly have nothing to do with delivering milk. Lactation has never been observed in any healthy male mammal. I had to qualify that last statement with "healthy" because there are diseases, such as certain tumors of the pituitary gland, that can cause men to produce milk, an inconvenient condition called galactorrhea. An imbalance in the endocrine system can also cause gynecomastia, enlargement of the male breast. Still, these are rare exceptions to the rule. Nipples and breasts may have the potential to be useful in men, but in general they appear to be extraneous.
So why do we have them? Could male nipples be vestigial organs, evolutionary equivalents of the appendix? Darwin proposed that male mammals once shared the job of providing milk to their young. Its delightful conjecture, and not unreasonable, but it remains in the realm of just-so stories because (so far) there is no way to test its validity. If the story were true, you might expect the most anatomically primitive mammals - monotremes such as the duck-billed platypus and echidna - to have males with more highly developed nipples. In fact, we see the opposite: monotremes - male and female - have no nipples at all (but the females still lactate, expressing milk via little pores in the skin). Im only aware of a couple mammal groups in which the female has nipples and the male doesnt (a feature we might call "mammillary sexual dimorphism"): horses and rodents. If male nipples are on their way out, they sure are tenacious.
Whether or not male nipples are a relic of evolution, they are almost certainly a relic of development. In the earliest weeks following conception, the male and female embryo follow a virtually identical developmental trajectory. Then at about 7 weeks, the production of testosterone kicks in and the male diverges anatomically from the female. By then its too late: nipples have already formed in both sexes. Biologically its conceivable that random mutations could reverse the continued growth of the male nipple, causing it to involute and disappear completely by the time the baby boy is born, but apparently there hasnt been pressure for such mutations to take hold, if they have occurred. There are occasional mutations that lead to the absence of one or both nipples (in both males and females), but they are typically associated with other defects such as missing muscles and sweat glands and webbing of the fingers.
So are male nipples utterly useless? Its hard to respond with an unqualified "yes," because someone can always come up with something plausible. In some men the nipple may be considered an "erogenous zone," but what part of the male anatomy isnt? Even the appendix, the poster child of vestigial organs, isnt totally useless: it contains an abundance of lymphocytes and other cells that fight infection. Still, as many appendectomy patients can attest, we can live perfectly well without it. The same goes for nipples in men.*
In the interest of gender equity, what about women? Do women have anything similar to a male nipple, an essentially useless part of their anatomy that reflects a developmental constraint? In a classic (1987) and controversial essay called "Male Nipples and Clitoral Ripples," the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould argued that the clitoris, along with the female orgasm, fits the bill. The argument is further elaborated in a recently published book by biologist and philosopher of science Elisabeth A. Lloyd: The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution. Evidently she makes a good case (click here for a review), but lingering doubts are understandable. I suspect that the average woman places a much, much higher value on her clitoris than the average man places on his nipples.
Instead of weighing in on that controversy, Id like to propose a better female analogue of the male nipple: the round ligament of the uterus. The round ligaments are two slender ropes of connective tissue that run from the top of the uterus to the front side of the abdominal wall, pass through the inguinal canal (approximately at the level of the bikini line), and ultimately blend into the fatty connective tissue of the labia majora.
In the female fetus, you can trace the round ligament from the abdominal wall all the way up to the ovaries. At those early stages of development the round ligament is referred to as the gubernaculum, which means governor (same root as gubernatorial). The male fetus has a gubernaculum, too, except that its attached to testes, not ovaries. As the fetus grows, the role of the gubernaculum is similar in both the male and female: it gently guides the gonads (i.e., testes or ovaries) during their descent from their birthplace in the upper part of the abdomen. As they descend, the gubernaculum gets shorter.
There the similarities end. The testes have much farther to go. While the ovaries drop down into the relatively well-protected pelvic cavity (the space surrounded by the hip bones), the testes travel onward, punching a tunnel (i.e., the inguinal canal) through the abdominal wall and ending up suspended in an outpouching of the abdominal wall called the scrotum. Click here for a little animation of the testes squeezing through the abdominal wall (the greenish band is the gubernaculum).
The different fates of the ovaries and testes are reflected in the gubernaculum. In the male, each gubernaculum shortens as much as possible and leaves little or no remnant in the scrotum. In the female, the middle of the gubernaculum fuses with the top of the uterus, forming what appear to be two separate ligaments: (1) the ligament of the ovary, which connects the ovary to the uterus, and (2) the round ligament of the uterus, which connects the uterus to the abdominal wall. See the illustration below.
The ligaments of the ovary may serve a useful function: each one appears to maintain the proper distance between the ovary and the uterus, so that the fallopian tube can receive eggs from the ovary during ovulation.But the round ligaments? As far as I can tell, theyre useless. One popular (and generally trustworthy) online resource (The Interactive Body Guide) suggests that the "round ligaments hold the uterus anteverted (inclined forward) over the urinary bladder." Seems reasonable, until you realize that something like 20-30% of women are born with a uterus that is retroverted (inclinded backward). The retroverted configuration is considered a perfectly normal variation that has no effect on fertility. In other words, the round ligaments arent very good at holding the uterus forward because theres no good reason for them to be.
Not only are round ligaments unnecessary, they can be a real pain - literally. As the uterus grows during pregnancy, the round ligaments stretch like rubber bands and tug on the abdominal wall, often causing round ligament pain. Fortunately the pain can usually be relieved with simple measures such as a hot bath, a shift of body position, or Tylenol. Like male nipples, the round ligaments of the uterus are relatively minor anatomical flaws, and any inconvenience they cause pales in comparison to the many anatomical marvels of the human body.
*More resources on male nipples:
- Why Do Men Have Nipples? A hilarious article from Salon.com.
- Why Do Men Have Nipples? A classic Q&A from The Straight Dope.
- Why Do Men Have Nipples? Hundreds of Questions Youd Only Ask a Doctor After Your Third Martini I havent read it yet, but its on my wish list.
Diagnosis and Type of Kidney Disease – Investigations and interpretations
Correlation of clinical and laboratory features is must for an accurate diagnosis and type of a kidney disease (renal disease) or glomerulonephritis. An experienced nephrologist can make a diagnosis of glomerulonephritis from thorough history, physical examination, urine examination and microscopy of urinary sediment. The assessment of presenting features of the patient, such as nephritic or nephrotic syndrome is important. However, the decision on the type of glomerulonephritis can not be based on the clinical and laboratory features; as the nephrotic syndrome may occur with any histological glomerulonephritis, and nephritic syndrome is the outcome of proliferative glomerulonephritis. So the ultimate diagnostic tool is renal biopsy and its light and fluorescent microscopy as well as ultrastructural study by electron microscope.
The interpretation of clinical features in the light of histological diagnosis of renal biopsy helps the clinician to detect any systemic disease associated with the renal disease (kidney disease). Majority of the patients with suspected glomerulonephritis need renal biopsy evaluation. However, in children with nephrotic syndrome; if there is no microscopic hematuria (blood in urine) and red cells or granular casts, renal biopsy procedure may be avoided initially. In patients, who do not respond to steroid therapy; renal biopsy investigation is must. There are around one million glomeruli (1x106 glomeruli) in each kidney and at least 5 glomeruli should be included in the renal biopsy evaluated histologically to achieve a diagnosis of glomerulonephritis.
Radiological and laboratory investigations in glomerulonephritis:
The clinical presentation, urine-analysis and microscopy findings, and presence of a normal upper & lower urinary tract on intravenous pyelography (IVP: a radiological investigation) or ultrasonography without any renal scarring could be indicative of glomerulonephritis, but there could be a need for renal biopsy.
Immune system associated investigations:
Our body is equipped with a multitasking immune system composed on lymphocytes, antibodies and complement system. The immune system always defends our body internally against a variety of infections and pathological conditions; and assessment of its components and abnormal products produced by it helps in diagnostic conclusions. Complement system of our body is composed of 9-components and boosts the body defense in association with cellular components. The blood level of complement components C3, C4 and C1q may be reduced or normal in some renal diseases. Low total serum complement, C3, C4 and C1q levels are observed in glomerulonephritis associated with circulatory immune complex disorders like systemic-lupus erythematosis (SLE), bacterial endocarditis and serum sickness. Normal levels of C4 and C1q but decreased level of C3 is generally observed in membranoproliferative glomerulonephritis (MPGN) and dense deposit disease of the kidney.
Following investigations are considered important to ascertain the diagnosis and type of glomerulonephritis:
Investigations for likely diagnosis of glomerulonephritis:
- Clinical presentation
- Urine analysis (proteinuria, hematuria and electrophoresis)
- Microscopy of urinary sediment
- Intravenous pyelography (IVP: Radiological investigation)
- Abdominal ultrasonography.
Investigations for likely type of glomerulonephritis:
- Estimation of serum complement components level
- Detection of circulating immune complexes
- Detection of auto-antibodies such as anti-nuclear antibodies (ANA), anti-DNA antibodies and anti-glomerular basement membrane antibodies (anti-GBM antibodies)
- Renal biopsy
Investigations for assessing the implications of glomerulonephritis and monitoring the effect of therapy:
- Determination of 24 hour urinary protein
- Determination of level of serum proteins
- Determination of serum cholesterol and/or lipid profile
- Determination of serum creatinine, blood urea and serum electrolytes.