Cobbers on the Brain

I was not very familiar with ALS before this week. I had an idea of what it was, but I was not aware of how a person got it, or what was done after they were diagnosed. That being said, I feel that I have learned a lot this past week. I was informed that it is hard to determine when someone has ALS, and when a person in diagnosed, there is very little that can be done to help. There are a few medicines that help prolong the disease, and I also found that by having a larger fat reserve, people with ALS live longer. However, people who are diagnosed with this awful disease will live a very difficult life that will end too quickly.

Not only does this disease take over the individual’s life, but it also requires help from others. Many patients depend on their families or care givers to help them with simple tasks, and hopefully they have a strong support system to help the patient feel as comfortable as possible while facing this devastating illness. I believe that an individual’s attitude towards life, whether he/she is sick or healthy, depends on the people that surround them; this is true for ALS patients as well. The main thing that can really be done for ALS patients is to make their life as comfortable as possible. It would be the hardest thing in the world to watch someone I love lose a battle with a disease after fighting so hard, but I would do everything in my power to help.
There are still a lot of questions I have about this disease like: how can we improve the lives of these patient and make their time on this earth better? There is so much unknown about the brain and why things happen the ways they do, and how can we fix one problem without creating another one? Scientists in this field have a lot of work ahead of them, but I feel we are headed in some sort of direction; whether or not it is the right one will be discovered soon enough, but for now I am thankful that there is research being done to understand the basics of many diseases that have ruined the lives of many.

As a senior, I chose to take a capstone in my major, and that course turned out to be neurochemistry.  Prior to taking neurochemistry, I had little to no neuroscience experience. This was frightening as well as exciting. I was worried I would just be lost in the content due to jumping into an upper level class with no prior experience, but I was also excited at the idea that I could get some insight on a whole new field of chemistry.
To be honest, the learning curve was steep. I had no idea what what going on for the first month or so. But after that, things started to click. I started to make connections just like any other class I’ve taken and since then I’ve grown to enjoy it. The most intriguing part of this class was how we brought the topics we were dealing with in class to a broader, more universally applicable level, instead of just focusing on what happens in a textbook or in a lab. The class essentially looked at a review article focusing on one neurological topic (usually a neurological-related disease/condition), worked as a class to understand the topic, and then discussed the relevant issues pertaining to the topic. We talked a lot about how the topic applied to society and how it will affect future generations. We talked about the politics, beliefs, and habits of our society and how they pertained to the topic. It was unlike any other science class I had taken before, and I really enjoyed it .
The bottom line is that most classes I have taken are lecture based and, for the most part, are pretty contained to themselves. The topics are discussed in a very limited scope and there usually isn’t a drive to take the information we have learned outside of the classroom or lab. With my capstone class, I was almost doing the exact opposite. We figured out how things were working as a class and then looked at how we could bring that information out into the non-scientific community. As a scientist, I know this is what I’m eventually going to have to do from time to time, and this class has been a huge benefit in showing me how to do that. I think it’s important for any subject to be able to communicate it’s issues to other areas of study, and science is no exception. Overall, I feel my capstone experience demonstrated the goals of a liberal education, and I am glad I took the course.

This semester I took my capstone course in chemistry – neurochemistry. This course was unlike any other chemistry course I have enrolled in. It was not the normal class where you sit, take notes, listen to a lecture and then have an exam covering the material. Instead, this course required much more individual involvement and research. Each week a topic was covered and current research was read on the subject. Most of the time, these articles were very overwhelming to read and our understanding after reading the article was very limited for the first day of class each week. The next day in class, each person had a topic that they covered individually and they told the class what they found out about the topic through their individual research. The third day of class each week we had a discussion day, and discussed what we still did not understand about the topic covered or what we thought was particularly interesting. These discussion days were my favorite days – we simply talked about what we had learned in the last week of classes and connected it to other knowledge we already knew. Having very little neurochemistry background when I enrolled in the course, I can say that I have learned a lot about neurotransmitter signaling and how this signaling can relate to diseases. The amount of knowledge I have gained within the last couple of months has far surpassed my expectations. I have learned so much about various diseases and how they can relate to so many different things in the body. I do believe that my speaking skills have greatly improved this semester also. Every week we had to present to the class a topic that we researched on our own. At the beginning of the semester, these were the days that I dreaded. I used to dread the days when I had to stand in front of my peers and speak. I would get so nervous and shaky, I would rush through my presentation and forget to say half of the things I had learned about my topic. By the end of the semester, I was much more comfortable standing up in front of others and sharing what knowledge I had acquired through my individual research. Overall, this capstone experience has been a great one. I have enjoyed this class very much and have improved my speaking skills, my ability to research, and my ability to summarize things and make them easy to understand for others.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease that has been increasingly making its way to the forefront of devastating diseases in our society. It’s likely that many of us know someone who is affected by AD, yet the exact mechanisms are not well understood and there is no current effective cure. Alzheimer’s disease exhibits severe dementia as a result of the degradation of neurons and synapses in the brain. AD is a disease that not only harshly affects those who have the disease, but also those who are left to care for and look after those who have it.

The causes of AD are not entirely known. There are countless pathways that are thought to contribute to the eventual build up of amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles. The amyloid plaques build ups of the beta amyloid protein and the tangles result from the build up of a wrongly phosphorylated tau protein. Pictured above is a comparison of a healthy human brain and a brain of an individual with severe AD. It is easy to see the damage done to neurons as a result of AD, and one can probably imagine the consequences of such neuronal damage.
So what do we do about this? Shouldn’t science was supposed to have an answer to these problems. Do we all just wait around our whole lives and hope that we don’t get Alzheimer’s and essentially lose our minds? It turns out that there are certain things we can do to help prevent it. In particular, our diets might be a good place to start.
To say that eating your vegetables will protect you from getting AD later in life would be a bit of a stretch. However, there are some significant ties between those who have unhealthy diets and those who develop Alzheimer’s.  A primary result of consistently eating unhealthy food is obesity, which has been on the upshot as of late. In turn, many obese people develop insulin resistance and type-2 diabetes. This has a whole set of consequences in itself, but there have been distinct connections made between those who are insulin resistant and those who develop AD.
Could our diets really have an effect on our health to the extent of Alzheimer’s disease? I feel like we could all admit that we could eat a little better. Sometimes it’s just easier to grab McDonalds on the way home or eat a bag of chips in the car. Our society has a very “go-go-go” attitude about everything, including food. It’s also difficult to see the long term affects that eating a bag of Doritos every other day has on us until it’s basically too late. Personally, I would love to eat healthier food. However, I’m broke college student. When I go to the store it’s much easier to buy a frozen pizza than some organic sugar peas. I think it’s primarily a problem of our society, and our diets seem to play a much larger role in our overall health than we probably realize.

Endocannabinoid signaling is the signaling that mediates the affects of cannabis (marijuana). The ethical question here is whether or not marijuana should be legalized as a medical treatment or not. Endocannabinoid signaling occurs throughout the body, and mediates many different types of functions in the body. When this signaling is active, it is known to increase appetite, improve memory, and induce sleep. So why not have marijuana legalized as a medical treatment? Marijuana stimulates the endocannabinoid system and can have all of these positive effects on the body. For example, someone who has had cancer and has lost a significant amount of weight. They are now cancer free and trying to recover. If the stimulation of endocannabinoid signaling can increase their appetite and help them gain weight, wouldn’t it be a good treatment? Medical marijuana can be used to treat all sorts of different diseases/ailments, but it should be legalized for the specific situations it would be helpful in. I know there is a lot of ethical questions surrounding the legalization of marijuana as a medical treatment, but wouldn’t it be helpful to have it legalized as a medical treatment for special cases?