Author: dentalstudentpathology

Exam 1 Details

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Hi everyone! Here are the details on exam 1.

Accommodations: Please drop me a quick email if you have accommodations (even if you’ve done so before) and let me know what your time accommodation is. I just want to be sure I get everyone, since there may have been some changes since Histology.

Date/time. The exam will be open from 12:00 am until 11:59 pm on Wednesday, September 24, and you’ll have 1 hour to complete it once you start. Just be sure to get it uploaded by 11:59 pm Wednesday night.

Password. The assessment password is YougotthisD2s.

Points/questions. The exam is rather short – just 21 questions, each worth one point. All questions are multiple choice with one correct answer, and no trickery or unclear (I hope) questions.

Exam breakdown. Here’s the breakdown by lecture:

  • Cardiovascular 1 (blood vessels): 5 questions
  • Cardiovascular 2 (heart failure, congenital heart disease, ischemic heart disease): 6 questions
  • Cardiovascular 3 (valvular disease, cardiomyopathies, tumors): 3 questions
  • Respiratory: 7 questions

That’s all I can think of! Please let me know if you have any questions.

Quiz 1 is ready for you!

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Here is the link to Quiz 1.

This quiz covers Cardiac Pathology 1, 2, and 3. is an open-book, open-note, talk with each other quiz, just as if we were doing it in the classroom. I’ve used Google Forms instead of Kahoot for this quiz, which makes it SO much easier for me to collect your responses, and also it means there’s no time limit for answering each question.

You can take the quiz anytime you want. The deadline for completing the quiz is midnight on Friday, 9/19.

You can also find the quiz on our schedule page, under today’s date (9/15).

Quiz 1 will be an online, take-home quiz

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Since I didn’t get through all of the cardiac pathology material this week, we’ll use our class time on Monday 9/15 to go through the last lecture (Cardiac Pathology 3).

We’ll finish early, since there are only 15 slides, but rather than doing quiz 1 in class (before you’ve had a chance to digest the material in Cardiac Pathology 3), I’m making quiz 1 an online, take-home quiz. We’ll use Google Forms, because that format is easier for take-home quizzes. The deadline for completing the quiz will be midnight on Tuesday 9/16, just so we can get it done with and it doesn’t linger over your head.

I’ll post the quiz on our website and also send out an email after class on Monday. Please let me know if you have any questions!

A blueprint for studying diseases

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We’re going to be talking about a LOT of diseases in this course – everything from mild skin infections to deadly brain cancers – and each disease has its own unique features that you’ll need to learn and remember.

This is a lot of information.

If no one helps you organize all of this information, then all you can do is plow through it and try to memorize as much as possible. That becomes frustrating very quickly. Plus, it’s a crappy method for retaining information. Your brain only holds that type of stuff in short-term memory until exam day – after that, it’s gone.

In this course, we’ll take a different approach. We’ll limit brute force memorization to an absolute minimum, and focus more on understanding why things are the way they are. And because your brain is constantly searching for patterns and similarities, we’ll give it the structures and frameworks it wants, so it can relax and enjoy itself.

Here’s a blueprint.

Here’s the first structure we’ll give your brain – it’s a list of the four aspects we look for in every disease:

  1. Etiology: the cause of the disease.
  2. Pathogenesis: the underlying mechanism of the disease.
  3. Morphology: the tissue abnormalities you see in the disease.
  4. Clinical manifestations: the signs and symptoms of the disease.

You can use this as a blueprint for any disease, and it will help you keep all the information in a pattern that your brain can remember. Let’s see what it looks like for a few of the diseases in our first lecture.

Atherosclerosis

  • Etiology: numerous factors including hyperlipidemia, hypertension, smoking, genetics.
  • Pathogenesis: chronic endothelial injury makes the endothelium more permeable; macrophages and lipids accumulate, smooth muscle cells proliferate and lay down collagen, and you end up with a plaque in the wall of the vessel. Plaques can occlude the vessel, or sometimes a thrombus will form on top of a plaque, filling up and occluding the vessel.
  • Morphology: vessel walls show plaques consisting of a soft fatty core covered by a fibrous cap.
  • Clinical manifestations: range from nothing (if the plaque is small) to chest pain, shortness of breath, and death (if the plaque blocks a major artery feeding the heart).

Essential Hypertension

  • Etiology: unknown
  • Pathogenesis: unclear – but probably related to a decreased ability to excrete sodium, which would lead to high levels of sodium in the blood, which would pull water into the blood because osmosis – and then you have a high blood volume etc. etc. and high blood pressure.
  • Morphology: hyaline and hyperplastic arteriolosclerosis
  • Clinical manifestations: nothing, until you’ve had it for a while, then it can damage your vessels and lead to stroke, aortic dissection, etc.

Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm

  • Etiology: atherosclerosis, sometimes genetic defects
  • Pathogenesis: plaques damage the wall of the aorta, leading to bulging of the vessel.
  • Morphology: enlargement of the aorta below the renal arteries; lots of atherosclerotic plaques in the vessel wall.
  • Clinical manifestations: can rupture, leading to massive blood loss. High mortality rate.

Make sense? Let me know what you think!

Welcome to Systemic Pathology!

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I am so excited to be back in the classroom with you guys I can hardly contain myself! Here’s a quick summary of how this course will work.

Content. In General Pathology, we talked about the ways things can go wrong in the body (injury, infection, immune dysfunction, neoplasia) and also the general mechanisms the body uses to fix these problems (tissue repair, inflammation, immune responses). This created a nice little brick foundation for your pathology house!

In Systemic Pathology, we’re going to add floors and rooms to the house. The course is organized into organ systems (cardiovascular, respiratory, etc.), and in each system, we’ll cover the abnormalities and diseases that are most relevant for you for your future practice (and for boards).

Format. This course has the same components as General Path:

  • Lectures: Lots of lectures. All of our lectures will be recorded, and I’ll post the recordings on our schedule page as soon as I get them (usually the same day as the lecture).
  • Quizzes: We’ll do these in class, using Kahoot. You’ll be able to talk with each other and use your notes, like you did in General Path.
  • Exam reviews: Same thing: in-class Kahoots. Only with exam reviews, there are prizes for first, second, and third place. Maybe the prizes will be coffee cards…maybe they’ll be cookies…who knows?!
  • Exams: We’ll use ExamSoft, and you’ll have the entire exam day to take the exam.

Grades. We’ll have three quizzes and four exams. At the end of the course, I’ll add all your quiz and exam points together (no weighting of exams or anything) to give you a final score for the course. Grades will be determined as follows:

  • A = final scores greater than or equal to 90% of total course points
  • B = scores between 80% and 90% of total course points
  • C = scores between 70% and 80% of total course points

Also, I just want to remind you that I’m still your “mom.” Dental school is fun and interesting…but it is also really hard and overwhelming. You need to take care of yourself.  So I’ll be checking in with you from time to time to see how you’re doing, and to remind you that I am here for you. If you need to vent, or want advice, or just need to know that you’re not alone, email me. We can stick with email, or we can do Zoom, or we can meet in person. Whatever feels best to you. I mean it. You are not alone.