You are the food that you eat. So, if you want to stay healthy and fit, here are some facts that you should know about the fats that you eat.

Sources of bad fats

•    Meat fat

Meat fat is bad fat because it contains low density lipoproteins (LDL) which could elevate your concentrations of lipids in your blood. These are the lipids that accumulate in the arteries causing blockage, atherosclerosis and hypertension. They contain more lipids than fat. Examples of these are pork and chicken fat.

•    Dairy products

Dairy products, such as cheese and milk, are also bad fats or lipids. They contain the same component as meat fats that contain more lipid content than protein. If you could not avoid drinking milk, then choose the non-fat milk.

Sources of good fats

•    Vegetable oils/fats

Vegetable fats are good fats, high density lipoprotein (HDL), which lowers a person’s propensity to cardiac diseases. These types of fats have, also, more protein content than lipid, so they are safer than meat fat.

•    Fish oils/fats

Cod liver oil and salmon oil great sources of good cholesterol or good fat. These good fats have various physiological functions aside from transporting bad fats from the arteries to be eliminated and metabolized.

Next time you go to a Fast Food restaurant, watch out for those chicken and pork dishes. It’s your choice whether you want to prolong your life expectancy or not. Making the right food choices would allow you to maintain good health and to enjoy your life longer.

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Fruits are considered antioxidants because they destroy the harmful free radicals that are produced in the body. They are rich with phytochemicals that render toxic excretory substances to less toxic ones. Papayas, berries, and prunes are examples of fruits that are good foods, if you want your skin to be glowing and unblemished. Prunes are also excellent for good skin. Fruits are also rich in vitamins, A, C, D, and E. Pomegranates contain polyphenol antioxidants that help keep the body and the skin healthy.

Vegetables

Spinach has been a subject of research because of its potential role in preventing cancer. Papaya and potatoes are rich with antioxidants. Aside from acquiring glowing skin, there are also several vitamins from vegetables like vitamin B and vitamin A. Green, leafy veggies are rich in iron, which is needed for the Red Blood Cells of your body.

Essential fatty acids

Essential fatty acids come usually from fish oils. These fatty acids promote clean, smooth skin; not oily and dry, but smooth. Fatty acids are also the simplest form of fats, so they can be metabolized effectively in your body.

Aside from these essential foods, you should also avoid alcohol and smoking. Smoking and alcohol has been proven through smoking to make a person look older than his real age. So, if you want a fresh-looking smooth and healthy skin, eat lots of fruits, vegetables, fish, and stay away from drugs and alcohol.
If you have done all these things and you still got dirty skin, then it might be time to visit your endocrinologist because the cause might be hormonal.

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CK2 or CKMB is an isoenzyme of Creatine Phosphokinase (CPK) which is specific for the heart. It is the second fastest-moving CK isoenzyme in electrophoresis.

LDH1 or LD1 is isoenzyme of Lactate Dehydrogenase that is significantly increased in Myocardial Infarction. It is the fastest moving isoenzyme of LD during electrophoresis.

AST is also elevated during M.I. because of its origin in the heart muscles. Together with CK2 and LD1, they could help doctors in the diagnosis of M.I.

Non-enzymatic panel tests are should be performed together with the enzymatic to provide more significant data.

The symptoms and other diagnostic tests of the patient should also be integrated when interpreting laboratory results.

The elevation of CK, AST and LD during a heart attack is that CK peaks first, then AST, and then LDH.

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A study entitled: “Quality of Sleep in Patients with Chronic Kidney Disease” conducted by Eduard A. Iliescu et al, yielded a 53 percent prevalence of “poor sleep” in patients with chronic kidney disease. They concluded that: “Depression was the only significant predictor of decreased quality of sleep among the independent variables considered,” and that “There was no association between the degree of renal impairment and the quality of sleep.”

The study concentrated only with chronic kidney disease, but in patients undergoing dialysis, the researchers have concluded, based on polysomnographic studies done in dialysis patients  that: “renal failure can directly influence quality of sleep because of obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) and periodic leg movement during sleep (PMLS.)

OSA is characterized by difficulty in breathing because of obstruction in the upper respiratory tract and a destabilization of the ventilator process.  Incidences of disordered breathing, and excessive sleepiness in dialysis patients also caused poor sleep.

Dialysis is done when a patient’s kidney could no longer perform its functions and there is kidney failure. It is a process where the toxic waste products of the body are excreted by using a special machine that eliminates waste products from the blood.

In another study: “Sleep Apnea Syndrome in Chronic Renal Disease” conducted by Kimmel PL et al, a relationship of sleep apnea and chronic renal disease has been raised. According to the researchers: “Some of the daytime sleepiness and disturbed nocturnal sleep in such patients may be related to sleep apnea.” Their results could be used further by future researchers to establish a significant and specific connection between sleep and kidney diseases.

The fact that kidney diseases, most especially those undergoing dialysis, could cause depression and consequently poor sleep could not be denied. The link between poor sleep and other types of kidney diseases has also become more defined with the studies conducted.

One simple condition that could cause sleep disturbances is polyuria characterized by excessive urination secondary to diabetes mellitus. Due to the number of times a person has to urinate, sleeplessness occurs. Oliguria is another kidney condition affecting sleep. It is characterized by less urination. Pain usually accompanies oliguria, so when a person is in pain, he would not be able to sleep properly.

These are some diseases that establish the link between kidney disease and sleep. Whatever condition that affects the body would consequently affect a person’s sleeping patterns as well.

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medical technologist examining a urine specimen, Image credit: Camille Santos

Here are important precautions that you should observe.

Know if the test is, indeed, routine urinalysis.

There are other tests done on urine samples such as:

• Creatinine clearance
• 24-hr urine test
• 12-hr urine test

Once you are sure that it is routine urinalysis, you can now request for a sterile urine or sample container from the lab aide or technologist. If the doctor ordered the test, then wait for the sterile specimen container from the lab aide.

The best sample for routine urinalysis is the early morning urine sample.

After you wake up, collect your specimen in your container by washing your vagina properly first. The early morning urine is best because it contains more sediments than other samples.

Do the midstream catch method.

After washing, you then discard the first portion of your urine, and then collect the midstream part.  This would prevent contamination from foreign or outside sources.

Open only the specimen container when you are ready to collect your urine.

Just like precaution no. 3, this would prevent contamination of your urine sample from foreign sources.  You have to cover your sample immediately to prevent contamination.

Preserve the integrity of your urine sample by preserving it properly.

The sediments in urine specimens could disintegrate or be destroyed if you do not preserve your specimen. You can do this by submitting your specimen immediately to the laboratory.

If this is not possible, then you should preserve your urine specimen by storing it at refrigerated temperatures. Your specimen should reach the laboratory within an hour. This is one of the major precautions in specimen collection for routine urinalysis.

If you have menstruation, you should ensure that you have washed well, and that no blood has contaminated your sample.

You have to inform the medical technologist that you are menstruating. This would make him/her aware of the circumstances surrounding your urine collection.

Label your specimen bottle with your complete name

Remember to label your specimen bottle correctly with your complete name, including your middle initials. You can do this using a pentel pen or a masking tape. The lab aide would label it as soon as you submit your sample but it would help a lot if you label the sample too.

Observing these precautions in the specimen collection for routine urinalysis would ensure accurate results obtained from your specimen.

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Stress can be good for you, if you know how to cope with it. Stress could allow you to perform better and give your best in any activity that you embark on, as long as you learn how to channel it properly.

Most people, however, channel their stress the wrong way. They allow stress to take over their lives and dictate how they would perform. There are the uncontrolled instances when people are prone to increased blood pressure. You could be a victim, as well, if you don’t know to manage your stress.

Stress is usually caused by the following:

• Anxiety
• Change of residence
• New job
• New place
• Any impending major events
• Exams
• Activities that are new to the person

Stress could also be relative, so you may have an activity, which other people don’t find stressful, but which you find stressful. Whatever it is, you should know how to delve deep into the root cause so you could cope with it.

Stress and high blood pressure

When you are stressed out, your emergency hormones, catecholamine, are increased in secretion to cope with your stressful situation. These hormones increase your pulse rate, blood circulation and blood pressure by acting as vasoconstrictors, among its other effects. That’s why sometimes when you’re stressed, your physical prowess is increased also; you could carry an object during a raging house fire that you could not previously lift.

The main catecholamines are epinephrine and nor-epinephrine or adrenaline and noradrenaline. According to the Fundamentals of Clinical Chemistry by Calbreath et al, catecholamines are responsible with the “Fight or Flight” response.

If you are not able to cope with stress, it could be detrimental to your health. Stress and anxiety, oftentimes, go hand in hand. Where there’s anxiety, there’s stress, so you have to control your anxious thoughts first.

When you are able to control your anxious thoughts and channel them to more fruitful outputs like writing or meditation, your stressful situation would diffuse and so does your blood pressure.

You could control your blood pressure by knowing how to cope with your stressful situations and changing your mind-set in general. Having an optimistic attitude and responding positively to stress is one major method of lowering your blood pressure.

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Stress is a very common experience by a lot of people nowadays. As people’s lifestyles have started to become less simple, there are more stressors that each one must handle each and every day. Perhaps because the different stressors have become part of the everyday routines in your life, you have might been so used to it without having realized that this excess amount of stress might harm you because there are a lot of stress-related illnesses. In fact, studies say that fifty percent of medical consultations are suspected to be due to stress-related illnesses.

Stress can either indirectly or directly affect your health. That is why you must pause once in a while, and reflect if your activities at work or in school might already be leading you towards the road to stress-related illnesses. Because a stressful lifestyle is also equivalent to a very unhealthy lifestyle, it has an indirect negative effect to your body’s well-being. People who are very busy have the tendency to have less rest, deprived sleep and no time for exercise and leisure. Furthermore, very busy people resort more to eating in fast foods than preparing their own home-cooked meals. This kind of lifestyle may eventually lead you to stress-related illnesses indirectly.

Stress also can directly cause changes in your bodily reactions that might not be good for your health. When you are stressed, your body physiologically adjusts to be able to cope up with the demands of your condition. Your body tends to release stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline to be able to adapt to the stressful situation. However, the increase in release of these hormones might make your body more prone to stress-related illnesses because of the increase in stimulation that it does to your different organ systems, especially the cardiovascular system.

The following are the most commonly identified stress-related illnesses:

• Hypertension
• Coronary artery disease
• Cerebrovascular accident
• Asthma
• Tension headaches
• Migraine
• Fibromyalgia
• Acid peptide disease
• Irritable bowel syndrome
• Stomach ulcers
• Insomnia
• Sexual dysfunction
• Irregular menstrual cycles

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Even if you have never seen, let alone visited a neurologist or a psychotherapist, you must have, at one point in your life, heard of Phineas Gage.

What do you mean you haven’t heard of him? I mean come on, when a guy survives after getting impaled by a three foot long iron rod in the skull, he tends to become famous. However, that’s not the only interesting thing about Gage. What’s curious about his case is that after he survived, he changed the world of neurology forever.

Phineas “You Make Me Feel Brand New” Gage

On September 13, 1848, 25 year old Gage was just doing his job as a construction foreman for the Rutland and Burlington Railroad in Vermont – he was busy packing explosives on the ground – the charge on the explosives detonated without warning. The iron rod he was using to tamp the explosives into the ground flew with such a force that when it hit his head, the 3 foot 7 inch rod entered his left cheek, went straight through his skull (and brain, of course) and emerged at the top of his head.

Moments later, they loaded him onto a cart and took him to a hotel where some doctor attended to him. Everyone was expecting him to die – Gage was bleeding profusely and the rod caused his left eye to become blind – but, curiously enough, he was able to walk and talk! Weeks after the accident, Gage was allowed to return to work, but his boss wouldn’t give him the same position as before. He complained that Gage had become rude, foul mouthed and irritable whereas before, he was mild-mannered, efficient and polite.

As such, Gage was never allowed to work at his former job again, until such a time that P.T. Barnum, famed exhibitor of “freaks”, hired him and put him on display as a curiosity along with the iron rod which impaled his head. Gage lived 13 years after his accident, dying because of epileptic seizures.

Experiments Galore

Gage’s accident made the enlightened people of the society think that certain portions of the brain can affect an individual’s personality. After studying Gage’s case, a surgeon concluded that tumors located on the frontal lobes of the brain had no effect on the cognitive functions of the brain; however, such localized tumors (or lesions) may indeed produce such uncharacteristic changes in a person’s behavior, as in Gage’s case.

This same surgeon removed a tumor from a patient’s brain in 1894. The patient initially complained that his thinking has become dull. Seeing the similarities between the patient’s mental faculties and Gage’s, he successfully removed the tumor that lay – you said it – in the left frontal lobes of the brain.

Now that they know that certain areas of the brain are responsible for certain functions, scientists became braver in experimenting with the brain. Now here comes the gritty part – when a German scientist discovered that dogs became tamer after the removal of their temporal lobes, doctors at an insane asylum in Sweden started performing lobotomies on hard, restless, even violent patients. As in the case of the German doctor’s dogs, these lobotomized patients became calmer after their surgeries.

The Ice Pick King and the Lobotomy Brouhaha

Lobotomies fell out of favor after a while, that is, until Walter Freeman came.  Freeman created the “superquick” method of performing lobotomies on patients – he locally anesthetized his patients and plunged an ice pick through the skull. Yes, you read it right. As if this wasn’t enough,  Freeman would then swing the ice pick back and forth, effectively severing the frontal lobe.

Ice pick lobotomies only took a few minutes, and it was reported that Freeman would usually set up shop and perform as much as ten lobotomies – not in a day – but in a single afternoon.

Lobotomy became such a craze in the 1960’s until it came to a point wherein it was no longer used to control violent psychiatric patients – homosexuals, “troublesome” personalities, political radicals, even “undesirables” got the treatment. It escalated into such a crescendo that even amateurs got to do it! These amateurs performed lobotomies without even performing psychiatric evaluations of their patients (think of the character Sweet Pea from the movie “Sucker Punch”).

I Rest My Craze

Due to the seemingly crude and inhuman nature of lobotomies, the procedure is now outlawed in most countries, but they are still occasionally performed to subdue violent behavior in some countries.

We have Phineas Gage to thank for, because his case revolutionized neurology – in good ways and in bad.

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What is in vitro hemolysis?

In vitro hemolysis is the lysis or destruction of red blood cells (RBC) outside the body. The RBCs could either swell or shrink, destroying the RBC.

Here are some causes of hemolysis:

• Using a smaller gauge than the standard. Ideal gauge of needle for venipuncture is usually 20-22. A gauge 25 needle is one significant cause of hemolysis, especially if blood specimens are handled roughly.
• Squirting the blood directly into the specimen container.
• Squirting the blood without removing the needle.
• Using wet equipment, like wet syringes and wet test tubes.
• Shaking the specimen vigorously.
• Freezing the blood immediately after collection.

Hemolyzed serum should not be used in laboratory tests because it would yield unreliable results.

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Here are some differences between serum and plasma:

Why is serum generally the most preferred blood specimen for clinical chemistry tests?

Serum is the preferred specimen because they have fewer proteins, which are considered as interfering substances for some tests.

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