Women and Estrogen

     As I was checking my email the other day, I saw an article named Too Much of This Might Double Your Risk of Dementia. As a biology major, I couldn't help but read it. To my surprise, they were referring to a woman having too much of the estrogen hormone. It is commonly known that women have more levels of estrogen than men do and that is why our voice has a higher pitch, our menstrual cycle is set, and we have more feminine characteristics. 

     The article stated how the study was performed on women who were postmenopausal so they had already stopped having their menstrual cycle. Typically, estrogen levels decline after menopause occurs. When women reaches this stage in her life, she may freak out a bit due to her estrogen levels and some women resort to estrogen therapy. This is a process where a woman will take medicine to continue having the same amount of estrogen her body used to produce naturally. However, the article stated that dementia was more likely for women found to have high levels of estrogen. This raises the debate whether or not women should do estrogen therapy and if dementia is truly linked to it. 

http://shine.yahoo.com/healthy-living/too-much-of-this-might-double-your-risk-of-dementia-175623173.html

My Dictionary

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Major histocompatibility complex molecules (MHC) are a type of glycoprotein that can be located on the cell membrane. These molecules are able to create complexes with antigens

http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/understandingcancer/immunesystem/AllPages/Print

Chemokines- proteins that are secreted by antigen presenting cells, stromal cell, granulocytes, and lymphocytes.

http://www.bio.davidson.edu/Immunology/chemokinespeech/chemokinetalks.html

Germinal centers- These structures aid in the formation of B cells because they have an increased number of receptors

http://www.niehs.nih.gov/research/atniehs/labs/lmg/sh/

First Week of Class

The first week of class went by extraordinarily slow, the last semester of your senior year may be the most stressful semester of your college career. (At least, that's how it has started our for me). However, I am excited and looking forward to taking this class in particular. I am eager to learn about the immune system in depth and about different diseases, infections, and vaccinations. Taking Histology last semester really helped with the information that we covered on Tuesday in class. I think this class will really help us apply all the information we have gathered towards more real life scenarios- people and diseases. I wish to become a PA, so I hope to learn concepts that will benefit me in a clinical setting.