Immune System 2 - MT3 Flashcards
What do Jehovah’s witnesses object to?
Blood transfusions (even if it can save your life) - on the basis of Biblical verses which seem to forbid the ingestion of blood
What can Jehovah witnesses do?
Eat meat
What does the Jehovahs bracelet do?
It allows people to know that they are a Jehovah’s witness when they are unconscious and they they will not receive any blood transfusions
What is the ancient sacredness of blood?
The idea that life of a being resides in its blood
What 3 meanings can blood have?
- Spiritual
- Scientific
- Artistic
What is the rule in Canada in terms of transfusing blood to save a life?
The medical staff can overrule a parent with or without a court order approval in the case of an emergency
- children cannot refuse but adults can
- case by case assessment
What is a possible solution to accommodate concerns about blood transfusions?
Bloodless surgery
Bloodless surgery
Surgery that does not involve transfusions of other peoples blood to replace lost blood during surgery
What is an example of a bloodless surgery?
A 6 year old boy received a heart transplant in a bloodless surgery
What are 2 the risks associated with blood?
- Infection
2. Inflammation
What are 4 advantages to bloodless surgery over a regular surgery that would normally required transfusions?
- Decrease in infection
- Decrease in inflammation
- Less blood clumping
- Less strokes
What is biomedical research mostly done on?
Animal models
What are the 2 most common animals for testing?
- Rats
2. Mice
What are 3 advantages to using animal models?
- Cheap
- Dont require many resources
- Fast process (short life time = few years)
What are 2 disadvantages to using animal models?
- Is it really relative to people because you are working on mice
- Streetlight effect
Streetlight effect
Is a type of observational bias that occurs when people only search for something where it is easiest to look
What have recent studies shown about mice? And how does this change past research?
- Studies now show that mice are more scared of men compared to women
- Could have ruined past research because they felt like they needed to defend their area
- men stressed them out and potentially made them do things that wouldnt normally happen
What does much biomedical research focus on?
A surrogate outcome
Surrogate outcome
Is a measurable outcome that is not a clinical outcome, but that might correlate with a clinical outcome
What are 2 advantages to using surrogate outcomes?
- Cost
2. Time
What are 2 disadvantages of using surrogate outcomes?
- It doesnt show long term effects
2. Streetlight effect
Epidemiology
Studies of causes and spread of diseases and how to cure them
What are 4 examples of epidemiology case studies?
- Zika virus
- John Snow with the cholera outbreak
- spread through contaminated water - Legionnaires disease
- Early stages of aids
Case studies
Is the first draft of medical research
- talk about cases that no one can diagnose
- they talk about what each one of them knows
- no control group
- cheap
Case control studies (retrospective studies)
Try to find out the things they have in common in their past
- uses a control
- compare 2 groups
- more expensive than case studies
Cohort studies (prospective studies)
Experimenter will manipulate a variable and have 2 groups similar in age, gender, weight etc to compare
- most expensive
- longest term
- most informative
