Real-life relevance

What’s it like to have scleroderma?

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Tomorrow we’ll talk about the systemic sclerosis, or scleroderma.

The New York Times has a nice recurring feature called “Patient Voices” in which several patients with a particular disease talk about how that disease has affected their lives. Here is a Patient Voice article on scleroderma. It’s a bunch of short stories (a couple minutes each), narrated by the patients themselves, accompanied by a series of photos of the patient. I highly recommend you listen to some of these. I identified with “The Mom with Frozen Fingers;” you may wish to start with “Losing his color” which is narrated by a 26 year old man. I think you’ll probably find yourself listening to more than one.

There are others Patient Voices segments on lupus and Sjogren syndrome too.

Excuse me, may I smell your MHCs?

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smell

Check out this interesting concept. You already know that the MHC I receptor is present on (pretty much) every cell in the body and presents antigen to cytotoxic T cells, and that the MHC II receptor is present only on specialized antigen-presenting cells and presents antigen to helper T cells. Right.

But did you know that these same receptors may be helping a woman decide on a mate? It seems that women prefer mates with MHCs very different from their own. That seems like a good idea – it helps provide diversity within the genome.

It would be hard to get a sample from every guy and bring it to the HLA-typing lab, but no need: the brain can detect MHC differences by smell (they’re associated with pheromones)! Weird. And cool.