Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA)

About a month ago, my dad told me that he was diagnosed with a sleeping disorder known as obstructive sleep apnea and I was surprised to learn that this condition causes him to stop breathing during his regular sleep. This was very confusing to me since I could not imagine how this happens. Sleep disorders include a range of problems, from narcolepsy to insomnia. I did a little “Googling” in order to help me get a better sense of it all. Obstructive sleep apnea is basically a disorder in which a person experiences abnormal pauses in breathing during sleep; some will stop breathing for a few seconds to a full minute. In my attempt for a better understanding of that, I imagined it was something like extreme snoring.  Little did I know sleep apnea is much worse, since after doing this repeatedly during one night it can deprive a person's brain from some much needed oxygen due to a buildup of carbon dioxide in the blood. This build up requires the heart to pump harder to try to remove the excess carbon dioxide from the blood.  This adds a great deal of stress on the heart, especially if it occurs repeatedly. I have added a video here with an illustrative overview.

 

 

Obstructive sleep apnea is a serious condition that can have some devastating effects on the body if it goes untreated. The effects of this condition vary depending on the severity of it. In the beginning the side effects may only be that the person feels tired and drowsy during the day. They may feel as if they are never able to get a good night of sleep no matter how long they are in bed. I am glad to know that there are many treatments, from lifestyle changes like losing weight to surgery, but the most common is the use of continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP), which is a machine that delivers air pressure through a mask placed over your nose while you sleep. Many people don’t like having to sleep with something on their head but it has proven immediate results and a relief in symptoms. People who do not see a change in their symptoms are people who do not follow through with the treatment. With regards to my dad, he complains of sounding like Darth Vader, but I think that’s sort of cool.

Girl...? or Boy..?

The suspense is torture; will it be a boy or a girl? Very important question and it can become the central focus of a woman’s first part of pregnancy. One thing is for sure, it helps to know the sex of the baby in order to shop for baby clothes and pick out the color of the nursery. But on a more serious note, a baby’s sex is determined at the time of conception. While on my journey for information on this subject I came across an interesting website that gives a step-by-step explanation on how a babies sex is established, you can access it here. When the baby is conceived, a chromosome from the sperm cell, either X or Y, fuses with the X chromosome in the egg cell, determining whether the baby will be female or male. Two X’s means the baby will be a girl and XY means it will be a boy the following video gives a short explanation on this.

 Even though gender is determined at conception, the fetus doesn’t develop its external sexual organs until the fourth month of pregnancy. At seven weeks after conception you can see that the fetus appears to be sexually indifferent, looking neither male nor female. Over the next five weeks, the fetus begins producing hormones that cause its sex organs to grow into either male or female organs. This process is called sexual differentiation. If the fetus is going to be a male, it will produce hormones called androgens, which will cause his sexual organs to form. On the other hand, a female fetus would not produce androgens; she would produce estrogens. I have also included a video here in reference to this.

 

We all want to have healthy babies, but it is common to have a preference as to what sex we want our baby to be. I would consider this to be a matter of what sex we feel more familiar with. Women perhaps would prefer to have a little girl since she knows how to identify with her and a man may desire a son being that he was once a little boy himself. But in the end we all settle for whatever we get so long as the baby’s health is not a concern. Thank you for reading! :)

Ahhh... Stop and Smell the Roses..!!!



Up until this week I had not realized how important our sense of smell really is. It helps protect us from dangers and learn more about the world we live in. It helps us decide if something smells good or bad.  Our sense of smell begins at our nose, but it includes other parts of our head and brain. How can the nose do all of this?

Take for example, the tiny particles that come out floating after you have turned on a match. These particles are too little to be seen with the naked eye, but the nerve endings of the olfactory nerves located on the olfactory epithelium are very sensitive to them and can easily detect them once they have traveled through the air. This nerve is located high up in our nasal canals and it helps carry messages to our brain telling it that there is a burning match. The process is a little more detailed than how I have tried to explain it here, which is why I have provided a short video which might help understand this process much better.

 

 

 Also, we would not be able to taste the foods we eat if it were not for our sense of smell. Taste is a chemical sense detected by sensory cells called chemoreceptors. When an odor stimulates the chemoreceptors in the nose that detect smell, they pass an electrical impulse to the brain. The brain then interprets patterns in electrical activity as a specific odor. Olfactory sensation becomes perception, something we can recognize as smell.  Not being able to smell and taste the food you are craving to enjoy can be a great detriment for anyone. Here I have provided a video that tells of a man who faced having to live without a sense of smell after being diagnosed with viral anosmia and it nearly ruined his life.

 

Our sense of smell can help protect us from dangers because it is often our first response to certain stimuli like harmful chemicals or fumes. Imagine being in the middle of a fire and not knowing it until you see the flames!

Human beings have a weak sense of smell compared to other animals; take for instance, the bloodhound’s amazing sense of smell. As we evolved, our need to smell things quite as well diminished and as we became more civilized we began to rely on our eyes and brain more. Our sense of smell is unique in one way from all of our other senses. When you first come into the kitchen you can smell dinner or a cake in the oven but after some time you don’t smell them at all. This is because our olfactory nerve endings become less sensitive to a continuous odor and will stop sending those messages, all while remaining sensitive to new aromas. Some people are able to develop their sense of smell for a special use. A perfume maker can tell all the different smells between different flowers and a wine maker has the same talent for telling wines from each other by their smell. In my research to obtain more information about olfaction I came to find that some people firmly believe that dogs can detect cancer by smelling a person’s breathe. I have always been a skeptic about this kind of thing but feel free to make your own judgment from the following video, which talks about this and how scientists have recently begun conducting more studies with positive results in the detection of cancer by dog.

 Smell is one of the ways we have of knowing what the world has for us. Close your eyes and smell a rose, or after a long rainy day, go outside and take a sniff. And that nice green smell of fresh cut grass that tells you spring is here. How about a slice of hot apple pie? You would not be able to taste it without olfaction.  Scientists today continue to explore how it is that we pick up odors, process them and interpret them as a specific smell. There remain a great amount of controversies about olfaction, like the existence of human pheromones and how they might help us select a romantic partner or how pregnant women become more sensitive to specific odors, but for now let us leave these interesting discussions for a later time. Thank you for reading.



Where Is My Memory..?

Have you ever found yourself in that awkward situation where you cannot quite remember a word or someone’s name, but it is right “on the tip of your tongue”? This and many other types of memory lapses are normal in people of all ages. Short term memory simply means that you are retaining the information received for a short period, like a telephone number used to order a pizza. Scientists believe that all information is initially entered into short-term storage, where it stays until the brain has time to consolidate it into long-term memory. If at any time something interrupts the rehearsal before consolidation takes place, the information would be lost. Long term memory takes place when you have formed neural pathways for storing ideas and information which can then pass and be recalled weeks, months, or even years later. To create these pathways, you must make a deliberate attempt to encode the information in the way that you intend to recall it later. If you prefer visual memory, material must be actively visualized. Auditory memory can be enhanced by speaking aloud, for example when you study. Recall is then sought by listening for (remembering) what you heard, saw, etc. This encoding process is called active learning. The following video can give you a glimpse at what it may be like to live without memory.

 

There are many brain diseases that can cause memory complications; among them is Alzheimer’s disease which is a form of dementia which not only causes problems in memory but also in thinking and behavior. Symptoms will usually start off slow and get worse over time, eventually becoming severe enough to interfere with daily tasks. Some forms of brain damage due to accidents can also cause Amnesia, which is another type of memory loss. In this case, memory can be either totally or partially lost depending on the extent of the damage. People with amnesia are usually lucid and know who they are, but have trouble learning new information and forming new memories. In most situations where there is brain damage, the person would have to undergo extensive therapy to help them recover.  There is currently no specific treatment for amnesia, but techniques for enhancing memory can help.