Sleep

Sleep Apnea
     Im pretty sure you have heard about sleep apnea sometime in your life. However many people have a misconception of it. In one of my classes at UTPA the teacher asked us to define sleep apnea. Many people believed that sleep apnea was a condition in which a person falls asleep without notice. To be honest with you I was one of the many who had that misconception
     According to the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute, sleep apnea is a common disorder in which you have one or more pauses in breathing or shallow breaths while you sleep.Breathing pauses can last from a few seconds to minutes. They may occur 30 times or more an hour. Typically, normal breathing then starts again, sometimes with a loud snort or choking sound.Sleep apnea usually is a chronic (ongoing) condition that disrupts your sleep. When your breathing pauses or becomes shallow, you’ll often move out of deep sleep and into light sleep.As a result, the quality of your sleep is poor, which makes you tired during the day. Sleep apnea is a leading cause of excessive daytime sleepiness.
      A sleep test, called polysomnography is usually done to diagnose sleep apnea. There are two kinds of polysomnograms. An overnight polysomnography test involves monitoring brain waves, muscle tension, eye movement, respiration, oxygen level in the blood and audio monitoring. (for snoring, gasping, etc.) The second kind of polysomnography test is a home monitoring test. A Sleep Technologist hooks you up to all the electrodes and instructs you on how to record your sleep with a computerized polysomnograph that you take home and return in the morning. They are painless tests that are usually covered by insurance.
     There are many treatments for sleep apnea. One of the most used is CPAP which is a mask that fits snugly over the nose and delivers pressured air just enough to keep your breathing passages open.
     People with sleep apnea are constantly having to wake to be able to breathe. This could happen several hundred times during the night. When this interruption happens, the person is not able to go into REM sleep. They are not able to go through the stages of sleeping that most of us take for granted.That is why during the day they fall asleep almost everywhere. That was where my misconception was. I thought that sleep apnea was when a person fell asleep without any control but they fall asleep because they did not sleep in the night. I included a video that shows how a person with sleep apnea battles through the night to get some rest.
More information on sleep apnea click here.

Reference
http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/health-topics/topics/sleepapnea/

Sex

Born a boy Brough up as a Girl.


     Here is another story of a "doctor" that used an innocent family to conduct his experiments. You might remember my previous post about the crazy doctor that performed the pre frontal lobotomies. You probably also remember how upset I was about it. Well as you have probably read the title of my blog you might understand why I am upset at this "doctor". We all have heard the debate of nature vs nurture and probably have our own belief about it. In this case psychologist, John Money, went to far to prove that nurture is the source of who we are. David Reimer was his victim. He was born an identical (non-intersex) twin boy in 1965. At the age of 8 months, David and his brother each had a minor medical problem involving his penis, and a doctor decided to treat the problem with circumcision. The doctor botched the circumcision on David, using an inappropriate method and accidentally burning off virtually all of David’s penis. At the advice of psychologist John Money at Johns Hopkins University, David’s parents agreed to have him “sex reassigned” and made into a girl via surgical, hormonal, and psychological treatments.     
     For many years, John Money claimed that David (known in the interim as “Brenda”) turned out to be a “real” girl with a female gender identity. Money used this case to bolster his approach to intersex —the approach that is still used throughout much of the U.S. and developed world—one that relies on the assumption that gender identity is all about nurture (upbringing), not nature (inborn traits), and that gender assignment is the key to treating all children with atypical sex anatomies.
     As it turns out, Money was lying. He knew Brenda was never happy as a girl, and he knew that as soon as David found out what happened to him, David reassumed the social identity of a boy. By age 14 she insisted that she wanted to live as a boy and that is when his father told her the horrible story. David decided to marry an older woman with children and adopted them as his own. However the damage was already done to him. David tried living a normal life after this but it was impossible because he ended his life a few years later.
    We see history repeating itself in science. In the name of science doctors commit unethical acts that ruin and sometimes end an individuals life.
     I have included a  3 minute clip on the documentary of David Reimer. Feel free to see the full documentary on youtube.
                                                                     Short 3 minute clip

   

Part 1 10 minutes

 

If you are interested in more clips please watch them on youtube

  http://www.isna.org/faq/reimer

Pain, Olfaction, Pheromones, and Synaesthesia

Placebo/Anti-placebo Effect

     Many of us have heard of the placebo effect. Placebo effect occurs when a treatment or medication with no known therapeutic value (a placebo) is administered to a patient, and the patient's symptoms improve. The patient believes and expects that the treatment is going to work, so it does. The placebo effect is also a factor to some degree in clinically-effective therapies, and explains why patients respond better than others to treatment despite similar symptoms and illnesses. It has been no secret that many of the drugs that we currently take today have to be measured or tested against a placebo. The biggest enemy for the drug companies in many cases is the simple placebo pill because the majority of the times the placebos outperform the drug that is being tested. Placebos can be administered in many different ways such as in pill form, injection, liquid form orally, etc.
     There have been many different experiments that test this phenomenon. One of the most famous one was done in a university where a group of college students were given non-alcoholic beer and another group was given regular beer. The setting was in a bar and to everyone's surprise the students with the non-alcoholic beer were acting drunk after a while. At the end of the experiment the students were told what the purpose of the experiment and the were shocked and embarrassed of their actions. This proves the power of the mind and the placebo effect. There have been many other experiments done to test the placebo effect and the majority of them are successful in proving it.
     There is another effect and that is the antiplacebo effect. In this, the contrary happens. For example, if there is a drug that has been proven to cure a certain illness and the person believes that the pill will not cure him/her they will not be cure. There has been cases that a person is told that they have a certain illness and they end up dying of it even though they never had it. We are just beginning to understand our brain and the power it has.
     You have probably heard of the word faith. It is mainly used in the religious world and it is defined on google as complete trust or confidence in someone or something. I sometimes think about the placebo effect as faith. Is it possible that science might be discovering how miracles work as they look into the placebo effect? I think they will. I have included a video that might help you understand the placebo effect and how big pharma's deal with it.

Learning Memory and Amnesia

Korsakoff’s Syndrome 

               Korsakoff’s syndrome also known as Wernicke-Korsakoff’s syndrome is a brain damage caused by prolonged thiamine deficiency (Vitamin B). People with the condition experience loss of short-term memory. This vitamin is needed to metabolize glucose which is the fuel that or brain needs to function. A person with deficiency of vitamin B looses neurons because they shrink and then die. A majority of the people with this brain disorder are alcoholics that go for weeks drinking alcohol without food or water in their system. Other people prone to this disorder are people with AIDS, cancers, eating disorders, people treated with diuretic therapy, long-term dialysis and others. Most symptoms can be reversed if detected and treated promptly. However, improvement in memory function is slow and, usually, incomplete. Without treatment, these disorders can be disabling and life-threatening. The treatment involves replacement of thiamine and providing the person with proper nutrition and hydration. In some cases, drug therapy is also recommended.  Again I was reminded of how perfect we were created when I see the complexity and how tuned our body needs to be in order to function normally. Our body does all of this complicated tasks automatically without us having to do much. I have included an informative video created by a group of students that I believe do a good job informing us about the syndrome. If you would like more detailed information on this syndrome I have also a web link that gives you more information on Kosakoff’s Syndrome.

Epilepsy

Epilepsy

              According to the A.D.A.M. Encyclopedia epilepsy is defined as a brain disorder in which a person has repeated seizures (convulsions) over time. Seizures are episodes of disturbed brain activity that cause changes in attention or behavior. There are many causes for epilepsy. Some of the main causes are stroke, traumatic brain injury and infections like meningitis, AIDS and some more. Many of the individuals with epilepsy have the disease and you will never even notice unless they are having a seizure in front of you. As I saw different stories on youtube about people with this disorder it made me more aware of how I should act if someone were to have a seizure in front of me. Would you know what to do? Well let me tell you. According to Dr. Karen Parko, M.D from San Francisco Veterans Administration Medical Center, you help them get on the ground to protect them from injuring their head due to a fall. If the person is not wearing a tag that identifies them as a person with epilepsy dial 911. Whenever in doubt dial 911 to have the person checked by a medical professional. Currently there is no cure for epilepsy. However there is medication or special diets that one can follow to reduce the seizures. In some cases people have had surgery on the brain to remove the area that is suspected to be causing the seizures.I have included an informative video on epilepsy. If you would like more information on this topic click here.


Understanding Epilepsy Video