February 04, 2019 Monday
Bedtime Story
Understanding Inflammation
Immune privilege offers protection to
organs from the potentially damaging effects of an inflammatory immune
response.
An inflammation is an immune response that
serves to ward off bacteria and viruses and in general any foreign invader
including a lifeless foreign body.
Yet an inflammatory response may
inadvertently overwhelm the host tissues in the battle that ensues in the form
of extensive collateral damage to the host tissues.
While such a damage may not do much harm in
tissues like bone or say skin (your cutaneous and orthopedic scars have hardly
declined your ability to reproduce or to defend yourself from enemies) they can
be calamitous to functioning of organs such as eyes, central nervous system,
placenta, fetus and of course your testicles.
Most people are unaware of the difference
between inflammation and an infection and often consider inflammation to be a
synonym for infection.
While it is true that all or most infection
will elicit an inflammatory response from the host organism (if the organism
has healthy immune system) it is not true that all inflammation is caused as a
result of infection.
Inflammation is the immunovascular response
to any insult on an organism that may result either through infection by
pathogens or through simple insults to the body such as injury, burns,
radiation and even stress.
Once an inflammation is initiated by the
body there is an entire range of mechanisms that have evolved to terminate it
once the insulting agent has been taken care of.
This is to prevent unnecessary “bystander”
damage to the tissues.
For some tissues such “bystander” damage
has far more serious consequence than others.
Just imagine a scar tissue disfiguring the
normal tissue architecture forming in either your retina (I do not have to
imagine it since I actually get to see them), brain or testicles!
Hence for certain tissues and organs to be
immunologically cloistered turned out to be an evolutionary adaptation rather
than a disadvantage.
It is something like Switzerland proposing
itself to be a land locked neutral nation around all its waring European
nations during World War II.
So eye in general and crystalline in lens
in particular (with its lens capsule and other barriers) limit immune cell
entry within their confines.
But this immune-privilege in some rare
cases works out to be a disadvantage for the organ.
Let me show you how this disadvantage manifests
in the case of couching technique of cataractous lens removal from the visual
axis.
In couching technique the cataractous lens
was poked with a sharp curved needle such that it was torn off from its zonules
and was forced to fall down at the bottom of the vitreous cavity.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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