Week 4: Recognising disease
Introduction
Welcome to the final week of the course.
Infection can affect any tissue of the body, producing cell damage and inflammatory reactions.
As David Male explains in the video below, the focus of this week is on studying pathological sections, namely those that show histological evidence of disease.
Download this video clip.Video player: 39889_ou_futurelearn_mc1008_vid_014-540.mp4
Transcript
DAVID MALE:
Now that you can identify a number of different human tissues under the microscope, we're going to start introducing some pathological sections. We've chosen a number of themes to look at this week-- infection and inflammation. For example, this is going to be illustrated by tuberculosis in the lung.
Another theme is cell death and degeneration. And there you'll be looking at Alzheimer's disease.
And, finally, tumours. Tumours are interesting because they may be a primary tumour, one that has originated from the tissue that you're actually looking at, or a tumour may be carried from another site to the tissue that you've got under the microscope. This is a secondary tumour. And the process by which it moves from one part of the body to another is called metastasis.
At the end of this course, we're going to ask you to look at a number of different pathological sections to identify the abnormalities, to try to deduce the underlying causes, and, finally, to venture a diagnosis of what the disease might be.
Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).
The sections that you will look at have been organised around three main types of pathology:
- infection and inflammation
- degeneration and cell death
- tumours (specifically hyperplasia, dysplasia and neoplasia).
You will learn more about these topics as you progress through the week.
In the end-of-course quiz you’ll look at a number of different pathological sections to identify the abnormalities, to try to deduce the underlying causes and, finally, to venture a diagnosis of what the disease might be.