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.