Connections

What knowledge have you connected with past knowledge?

I'm not a biology major and I haven't taken as many of the courses that my classmates have, but I have made connections nonetheless. The most that I can relate to, so far in this course, is Anatomy and Physiology. All of the connections topic presentations remind me a lot of the information and material that was covered in A&P. A topic that is relevent in my life and fresh in my mind is the myelination of nerve cells and its relation to multiple sclerosis.

In A&P we focused on how the main purpose of a myelin layer (or sheath) is to increase the speed at which impulses propagate along the myelinated fiber. Just in the most recent chapters covered in this class we discussed sphingolipids with respect to myelin , sphingomyelin. Demyelination is the loss of the myelin sheath insulating the nerves, and is the hallmark of some neurodegenerative autoimmune diseases, including multiple sclerosis.

My aunt recently passed away and she had MS so this disease has played a major role in my life. In the past few chapters learning about lipids and membranes more exclusively and connecting that with everything that I have learnt previously in A&P has only helped me to make more connections about this particular disease that was not already obvious to me. The more I absorb from every class the more all of this "connects" within my mind, no pun intended. It is easy to get a generic two sentence definition of a disease from "webmd", but the more I become familiar with the biology and chemistry involved in the causes for diseases present with in living organisms the more I realize how truly complex these processes are.