Group Lab: Sheep Heart Dissection

1. What's the purpose of the pericardium?

• Surround and protect the heart
• Fibrous pericardium anchors the heart and provides protection through its tough, inelastic, and dense irregular tissue

2. Observe the blood vessels connecting to the heart. How do arteries differ from veins in their structure?

• Arteries have thicker walls and veins have thinner walls

3. What function do you think the auricle serves?

• It expands the blood-holding capacity of atrium

4. What differences do you observe between the atria and ventricles?

• The atria are smaller than the ventricles and the ventricles collect and expel blood from the atria into the body or the lungs

5. Use words or pictures to describe each

1. Coronary sinus

• blood vessel that goes across the back of the heart

    B. Inferior vena cava

• doesn’t have it because it was cut too close

    C. Tricuspid valve

• looks like a flap

6. Draw a picture of tricuspid valve, including chordae tendinae and the papillary muscle

7. Why is the “anchoring” of the heart valves important?

• It’s important so that the valve doesn’t get carried away with the blood

8. Use words and pictures to describe what you see.

9. What’s the function of the semilunar valve?

• It prevents blood from flowing back into the heart

10. If the valve disease occurs on the right side of the heart, it results in swelling in the feet and ankles. 
 (a) Why might this happen?

• Blood is supposed to leave the feet and ankles and go through the right side of the heart, but with this disease, there is a backflow of blood because the valves are improperly functioning

      (b) If the valve disease occurs on the left side of the heart, what complications would you expect to see?

• You would see that you aren’t getting a sufficient enough of blood to the muscles and body and therefore you would notice you have shortness in breath

11. Using pictures and/or words, describe what you see.
(a) Entrance to the right and left coronary arteries: they connect to the aorta and they revolve around the back of the heart
(b) Left aortic semi-lunar valve: looks like a flap
(c) Chordae tendinae of the bicuspid valve: fibrous and tendon-like chords that connect the valve to the papillary muscle
(d) Papillary muscle of the biscupid valve: connects to the bottom of the left ventricle, lump of muscle that connects to the chordae tendinae and helps open and close the bicuspid valve
12. Describe how the left and right sides of the heart differ from each other.

• left side is more muscular → pumps blood through body
• right side is not as muscular because it pumps blood to lungs

13. Draw and label all structures visible in the interior of the cross-section

Unit 3 Reflection

This unit was about the physiology of different parts of the heart and how they all worked together as a whole. The unit also included several problems that the heart could have and possible ways to fix these problems. The cardiovascular system works by pumping nutrient and oxygen-rich blood through the body, and returning the deoxygenated blood to the heart to pump it to the lungs.

Cardiovascular health is the state of the arteries and if they are cleared and not filled with plaque. A heart attack is caused by a build-up of to much plaque in the walls of the arteries which results in less blood flow, and a cardiac arrest is an electrical malfunction in the heart's rhythm.

A stroke is caused by a blood clot usually in the brain or in another part of the body and travels to the brain. I can promote my cardiovascular health by eating  from proper food groups such as fruits and vegetables as well as carbohydrates and protein.

I want to learn more about how a malfunction of the valves, or a leak can affect the entire heart and also how alternative methods such as valve replacement can be used to prevent patients of heart attacks and prevent a heart attack from occurring.

For the most part, it was easy for me to memorize the different parts of the heart and how they all worked together to make the heart function, and it was easy for me to understand how the circulatory system worked. However, it was difficult for me to imagine what to do in a real world situation if the heart malfunctioned in some way such as a blood clot resulting in a stroke or a heart attack. It was also difficult for me to tell the difference between some of the different types of white blood cells and the different treatments of heart disease. 

I believe that working together to create the chalk drawing of the hearts was successful, however, I did not believe that the video was necessary. I also liked the activity for the one Monday wellness on jump roping during this unit because it taught me a lot about how the circulation of blood was relevant to the exercise that we do, and it also taught me how helpful jump roping can be as a form of exercise and prevent heart disease. I learned that as a group it is important to have everyone fully onboard and participating with projects because it helps everyone involved and one person is not stuck doing all the work. As a class, it is also enjoyable to have everyone participating in discussions because that makes the lessons that we learn more interesting.

Based on what I learned in this unit, I think I have successfully accomplished my unit 2 goals because I did figure out how to connect the individual parts of the heart and their functions and figured out how they help the body and why they are so important to our health in general. My new goal for the rest of the semester is to be more active during class, especially with the Monday Wellness presentations.

Unit 2 Reflection

In this unit, we learned that health is the measure of our body's efficiency and overall well-being in three categories: mental, physical, and social health. 

I personally would not consider myself very healthy because I eat a bunch of junk food such was pretzels due to inconsistent meal times. I also probably do not exercise as much as I should because I am always busy and stressed by school assignments such as homework and projects. I feel like the majority of people at SHS are healthy physically, but we face a lot of pressure mentally and socially to fit in and have the best grades at the school. To help fix the amount of pressure on students teachers could get rid of any "busy" work (work that is given out just to have the students do something for homework and say that the class is doing something) that they give the students and concentrate the homework on lessons that will help them prepare for the AP tests or help them understand the lesson that they learned in class.

From this unit, I have learned that hormones play a big part of regulating healthy stress responses, eating, and sleeping habits in the body.While stress can help a person by boosting their productivity, too much of it can cause distress. Stress has three main stages, the alarm phase, resistance phase, and the exhaustion phase throughout which stress becomes an increasingly negative factor. Cortisol is the hormone that is secreted by the adrenal gland in response to physical or psychological stress, or sleep deprivation. Sleep helps us function by shutting down all awareness of the outside world and helps organize the long-term memory of the brain and deal with new information and our emotions. Eating is also an important function of the body that is regulated by hormones. Insulin helps move macronutrients such as carbohydrates and proteins into cells. From there, leptin regulates the amount of energy that is being used and amount of fat that is being stored, and regulates energy expenditure based on these two factors. Eating from the six classes of nutrients: carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, vitamins, and water, help reduce the risk of receiving a chronic disease later on in life.

After this unit, the only thing that I didn't fully understand was section on exercise. I didn't understand why children need less exercise than adults do. This was very confusing to me as I believe that children are more physically active than most adults are and yet they need less exercise. 

For the next unit, I will try to connect the different functions of the heart and their physiological affect on the body together, so I can understand how all the different sections of the organ can work together as a whole, and help benefit the body.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dqXHHCc5lA
I have included above a link to a TED Talk on how nutrition helps mental heath. This Talk helps connect to our unit because health is defined as not only a person's physical fitness, but mental fitness as well. This talk includes both of these categories. Psychologist Julia Rucklidge states that in today's world we mostly rely on medication to help fix our mental problems. However, recent studies have shown that the amount of people with mental illnesses such as ADHD, depression, and bipolar disorder have gone up as has the number of prescription medicine. Through her studies, Rucklidge has seen that people with these illnesses who eat a healthy, balanced diet complete with vitamins and nutrients and don't take prescription medicine are less affected by their mental illness both at home and in the workplace than people who do take prescription medicine. People who eat balanced diets and have depression have actually reported that their depression has gone into remission versus people who take medicine have only reported a short term fix in their illness. Overall the research shown in the TED Talk has illustrated that a healthy diet can improve your overall mental wellbeing better than any artificial stimuli in prescription medicine.

Heart Rates and Blood Pressure

When physicians measure blood pressure, they look for your systole and the diastole in order to get an accurate reading. After using a sphygmomanometer to briefly cut off blood supply to the arm, the doctor lets the air out of the sphygmomanometer slowly. The time when he first hears your heart beat is the systole, and the time when he cannot hear the beating anymore is the diastole.

As I mentioned earlier in this post, a sphygmomanometer is often used to measure blood pressure because a person can hear the systolic and the diastolic pressures. They can figure out the maximum pressure achieved when ventricular contraction occurs during systolic pressure as well as the lowest pressure during ventricle relaxation which is called diastolic pressure.
To use a sphygmomanometer, wrap the cuff around your arm, just above the elbow with the two tubes on the inside of the elbow so that they aren't tangled up beneath the arm. Then, use the inflation pump to pump air into the cuff so that it reads about 150 on the aneroid manometer gauge, briefly cutting off blob flow to the arm. Next, slowly let air out of the cuff, and using a stethoscope, listen for when you can hear the blood rush back into the arm, and for when the sound of blood stops as the pressure equalizes in the arm. Make sure to not have the cuff on the arm while inflated for very long periods of time, as that could damage the arm.
A person can measure heart rate in many different ways there than using a sphygmomanometer. One of these ways is to use a stethoscope on your chest to hear your heart beat. Another way is to put two fingers (not your thumb) under the side of the chin on your  carotid artery or on the inside of the wrist on your radial artery, and count how many beats you feel in a minute. Heart rate can be determined this way because it is easy to calculate the amount of heart beats per minute.

The reason that people aren't supposed to measure their pulse with their thumb is because you can measure your pulse with your thumb the same way you can measure your pulse with on your wrist and on your neck. Since people can feel a pulse from the thumb, it would interfere with finding the pulse on your neck or wrist.

Nutrition Analysis

While I was monitoring my diet, I found that while I thought that I was eating a lot of extra food, I actually am not eating such a balanced diet as I thought I was. I realized that while I am eating more fruit on weekdays, I am not eating a lot of fruit on the weekends and I eat less vegetables during the week than I do on the weekend. Diet monitoring has helped me see how much I actually need to eat and will help me improve my diet in the future.
Not only have I learned from the diet monitoring, I have also learned a lot from the Falcon Market. During the market as I was examining various nutrition labels, I realized that foods that I originally thought were healthy, weren't that healthy. I learned that hydrogenous oil can be just as bad for the body as trans fat, and that if the amount of trans fat in a product was lower that a gram, then companies don't have to put it down in the nutrition label. Examples of such products include peanut butter, where the nutrition label states that it has hydrogenous oil and lots of sugar. If peanut butter was really healthy, then the main ingredient would be peanuts, not sugar! 
After I realized that some of these foods weren't as healthy as I thought they were, I decided to improve my diet. 
To do this, I could try to eat more vegetables, especially when they are in season because I do not really eat them as much as I should, especially on week days. I can also continue to monitor my diet and try to balance it out more by eating more nutrient-rich foods from all five categories on the food pyramid. What I found from the days when I was monitoring my food was that I have been so paranoid about overeating, that I haven't actually been eating enough of all the food groups and I usually have a deficiency of all five nutrients. I should be consuming about 2000 calories a day according to the super tracker, but in reality I am usually eating about 800 calories each day that I was tracking my food. To help improve my eating mentality, I have started exercising more so that I feel better about eating more food in a balanced diet, and as an added bonus, the exercise helps keep my body in good shape.

If I had the opportunity to coach someone on proper health and nutrition, I would tell them to try and make sure they eat nutrient-rich foods from all five of the main food groups every day. I would also tell them to make sure they exercise daily in order to burn off extra empty calories so the body doesn't have as much unhealthy fat. Lastly, I would suggest that people eat foods such as kale, broccoli, strawberries, and other seasonal fruits and vegetables when they are in season. Seasonal foods generally are cheaper and more fresh when they are bought in season so that the consumer receives more nutrients for a lower price.

What is Health?

Fitness/health is one of the most widespread topics in our daily society, but a subject that people know the least about. Many people believe that health only affects our physical fitness and how in shape shape we are, however, health is the combined social, mental, and physical aspects of our life.

In our ever-changing society, with our busy lifestyles, it is important to maintain a balance between these three sections of our health so we can continue to function as human beings. To maintain a balance for physical health for instance, it is important to exercise and eat healthy. While people may know they need to eat healthy, they might not know that they should eat from five different food groups every day in order to have a balanced diet. The five food groups include: vegetables, fruits, grains, proteins, and dairy; and all five of these groups make up the nutrition section of the Five Pillars of Health.
The Five Pillars of Health are the different aspects of our lives that we need to balance in order to live a healthy lifestyle. There's nutrition, that provides support, and energy needs. Exercise, which uses the body to get energy, and staves off disease. Sleep helps rest and restore the body so that it's ready for the next day. Stores manages constant changes to the body and the mind, and lastly, the social pillar is the way we interact with our environment. All five of these "pillars"are important to creating a stable mental, physical, and social heath. For myself, I could work on stress management as I often try to accomplish more activities and take on a higher workload than I should and therefore am more stressed than I should be. However, socially I have a great group of friends who I can trust and physically I am doing ok despite having a higher carbohydrate consumption level due to the after-school sports that I am apart of.

Unit 1 Reflection

In Unit 1 our class learned about the different anatomical terms used to define positions and the proximity of locations in the body. We also learned about Histology and the four major types of tissue: epithelial, connective, muscle, and nervous. Each tissue preforms a specific role in the human body that helps keep us functioning throughout our lives. For example, connective tissue helps connect all the organs inside the body and acts as a transportation system for circulating nutrients throughout the body and for removing waste.

Some themes in this unit included how form fits function. This saying means that the function of the particular cell, tissue, or organ depends on how it was built, where it is located, and what structures it contains. For example, skeletal muscle is closely attached to our skeleton and consists of long, cylindrical cells with multiple nuclei. This particular muscle helps us move our limbs and accomplish a range of activity from running around to picking up a pile of books.
After all of the work we have done in the class so far, the one thing that I would like to improve on is my tissue classification. Before this class, I never needed to know the classification of so many tissues or which category of major tissue they fell under. I have gained a lot of new insight that has helped me classify tissues now, but I still mix up a couple of the tissues and would like to improve in the future.
For the next unit, I know a little bit more about anatomy and physiology now than I did before I started the class. I can refer back to this knowledge while learning new material. However, I will still try to work on memorizing more of the vocabulary and I will try to picture the different anatomical structures working together such as the lungs working with the circulatory system to pump oxygen through the body, or a cell's nucleus and ribosomes working together to create proteins.
A real world job where I can use the knowledge I gained from this unit is the job of a veterinarian. Even though what we are learning mostly refers to human anatomy and its physiology, many animals have the same organs that accomplish the same function as ours do. My logic is to have an understanding of how an animal's body works as a vet, one must first gain a greater understanding of how a human body works as well.

Tissue Lab

In this lab I learned that even though certain types of tissues are classified under four main categories- muscle, nervous, connective, and epithelial tissue; there are lots of different subcategories of tissues in each of the main categories. For example, elastic cartilage is different from fibrocartilage, but both are classified as as connective tissue.
All four of the main tissue types have their similarities and differences. Epithelial and connective tissue both cover the body and help protect its organs, muscles, etc. However, while the epithelial tissue mainly helps with protection, absorption, and filtration, connective tissue helps bind and strengthen body tissues, protect and insulate internal organs, store and transport energy, and is the site of immune responses. Muscle tissue helps with voluntary and involuntary movement of organs and limbs, and nervous tissue helps transport electrical signals from one cell to the other and helps with tissue regeneration.
The anatomy and location of any particular tissue can help determine its function. For example, one can assume that skeletal muscle attached to the skeleton is there so it can help move the bones in limbs and help with voluntary movement. Another example would be the location of nervous tissue around the spinal cord. By its location, a person can assume that the nervous tissue is there to help send electrical signals through the body and into the brain because of the spinal cord's close proximity to other organs. 

Specialized Cells: Oligodendrocytes

Oligodendrocytes



http://physrev.physiology.org/content/81/2/871

The Oligodendrocytes are located in the Central Nervous System. They are smaller than some of the other glial cells located in the Central Nervous System. They have a dense nucleus which contains dense chromatin, and dense cytoplasm and the presence of a large number of microtubules in processes to help with stability. Another unique trait of oligodendrocytes is that they lack fibrils and glycogen in the cytoplasm.

Oligodendrocytes specialize in helping to form the myelin sheath around axons in the Central Nervous System. The myelin helps regulate the axonal caliber, maintains the axons, and helps inhibit the growth and regeneration of axons. Oligodendrocytes are classified as nervous tissue because of the role that they play in the Central Nervous System.

Sweetness Lab

In this lab we drew dark circles on paper towels. In these circles we placed small samples of various carbohydrates such as sucrose, starch, maltose, etc. and labeled the different circles based on what substance we placed in them. Then, using sucrose as our carbohydrate control, which we compared the sweetness of all the other carbohydrates to. 

In the lab, there appeared to be a correlation between the number of sugar rings in the carbohydrate and its degree of sweetness. 

For the most part the monosaccharides appeared to be the sweetest carbohydrates with the exception of galactose and sucrose. The more sugar rings that there were added to the monosaccharide, the more bland the carbohydrate appeared to become. For example, the polysaccharide starch was less sweet than the monosaccharide fructose. The exceptions to this theory are sucrose, which is a disaccharide and sweet, and galactose, which is a monosaccharide and not as sweet. 

The various carbohydrates in this lab relate to several different foods. The fructose reminded me of fruit not only because of its name, but because the sweetness of the monosaccharide reminded me of the sweetness normally found in fruit. The maltose reminded me of cereal because of its grain-like taste and lactose reminded me of the taste of powdered milk. All of these different carbohydrates have a place in our food system and are important in helping our bodies create and store energy.

The sweetest carbohydrates in this lab were monosaccharides fructose, and glucose, and disaccharide sucrose. As the carbohydrates in the lab became more complex and formed disaccharides, and polysaccharides, the carbohydrates became less sweet. The exception to this theory is the carbohydrate galactose, which is a monosaccharide but is less sweet than all the other monosaccharides in the lab.

Another characteristic of the carbohydrates in this lab was that as more sugar rings were added to the carbohydrate, the more powdery the texture was. Monosaccharides and sucrose and maltose had a granular texture, while the other disaccharides and polysaccharides had a powdery texture.

The testers did not all give the same rating. Some reasons for this could be that the testers still had the taste of one carbohydrate in their mouths so that the taste of that carbohydrate may influence the way another carbohydrate may taste. Another reason a tester may not give the same rating as others is if he/she is sensitive to sugar or bland food. For example, a person who eats oatmeal for every meal every day without any toppings may say that a lollipop tastes extremely sweet, while a person who has two or three lollipops a day may say that lollipops are not as sweet as the person who eats oatmeal says. This is because the person who eats lollipops is so used to the high amount of sugar that they think it is normal. Lastly, knowing what they taste in advance may influence testers. If a person expects a carbohydrate to taste a certain way, that could determine how sweet or not sweet they think it actually is.

The monosaccharides in this lab are similar not only by their shape, but also by their role in the human body. Almost all of the monosaccharides store and create energy in the human body and all three monosaccharides (fructose, glucose, and galactose) help the metabolism.

Carbohydrate structure could determine if the cell uses the carbohydrate for structural support in the body, or for creating energy, or for helping store fat and/or energy.

My original hypothesis was “If sucrose tastes sweet with its granular texture, then all carbohydrates with granular textures will taste sweet.”

For the most part my hypothesis was correct most of the carbohydrates with granular textures tasted sweeter than the carbohydrates with powdery textures. The only exception to my hypothesis was the carbohydrate maltose that had a granular texture, but did not taste as sweet as the others.

Humans taste sweetness by the taste cells that they have in their taste buds. When eating, a certain amount of these taste cells will respond to sweetness while others will respond to sour, salty, bitter tastes, etc. A human might have more or less of these taste cells respond to sweetness, which is why tester opinion may vary.