Understanding Health, Diseases, and Healthy Habits
Health: The absence of disease and well-being, encompassing physical, mental, emotional, social, and sexual aspects. Risk factors that increase the risk of disease include foods high in fats and sugars, alcohol, tobacco and other drugs, lack of personal hygiene, and life stress. A change in one gene is a mutation. Environmental factors influencing disease development include carcinogens, contaminated water, and high levels of pollution.
Healthy and Harmful Habits
Healthy Habits: A balanced diet, maintaining a healthy weight, adequate physical activity, and good personal and home hygiene.
Harmful Habits: Poor nutrition, being overweight, lack of physical activity, poor personal and home hygiene, alcohol consumption, tobacco use, and other drug use.
AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome)
Transmission: Parenterally, sexually, and from mother to child.
Cause: HIV, a retrovirus with RNA as its nucleic acid, characterized by its small size.
Cancer
What is Cancer? The abnormal proliferation of cells causing a tumor.
How Cancer Spreads: A benign tumor becomes malignant and can invade other organs through the blood.
Major Causes of Mortality Worldwide
Cancer and circulatory and cardiovascular diseases.
Cardiovascular Diseases (CVD)
Risk Factors: High cholesterol, high blood pressure, age, sex, diabetes, sedentary lifestyle, obesity, stress, and smoking.
Examples: Myocardial infarction, angina pectoris, and arrhythmias.
Impact of Inactivity, Obesity, and Stress: These factors affect CVD indirectly.
Unchangeable Risk Factors: Sex and age.
Mental Diseases
Changes in intellectual functions not directly related to brain cell damage or malfunction.
Dementia
Progressive loss of intellectual functions.
Types of Dementia
- Senile: Typically affects people over 80 years old.
- Presenile: May be present from the age of 50.
- Alzheimer’s Disease: Characterized by memory loss, loss of ability to think, and changes in behavior.
- Parkinson’s Disease: Deterioration of neurons that control involuntary muscle movement.
Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases
Allergens: Antigens that trigger allergies.
Autoimmune Diseases: Occur when the immune system mistakenly recognizes the body’s own cells as foreign.
Nutrition and Eating Disorders
Balanced Diet: Provides all the nutrients needed for growth, repair, and bodily functions. An example is the Mediterranean diet.
Common Eating Disorders
- Obesity: Excessive accumulation of fat that can be harmful to health. Assessed using BMI (Body Mass Index), calculated by dividing weight by the square of height. The root cause is an imbalance between calorie consumption and energy expenditure.
- Anorexia Nervosa: Voluntarily stopping eating, often accompanied by excessive exercise and use of laxatives and diuretics. Individuals with anorexia have a distorted body image and are often perfectionistic or overly concerned with their appearance.
- Bulimia Nervosa: An eating disorder caused by anxiety and excessive concern with body weight and appearance. It involves periods of abusive ingestion of high-calorie foods followed by purging behaviors like vomiting, laxative use, and excessive exercise. People with bulimia often have low self-esteem and feel guilty about overeating.
BMI (Body Mass Index): Calculated by dividing weight (in kilograms) by the square of height (in meters).
Infectious Diseases and Immunity
Germs: Causative agents of infectious diseases.
Infectious Agents: Viruses, bacteria, protozoa, and fungi.
Transmission: Can be direct or indirect.
Antigen: An infectious agent that triggers antibody formation.
Antibodies: Proteins produced by white blood cells in response to antigens.
Characterization of the Immune Response
- Specificity
- Diversity
- Distinction between self and non-self
- Memory
Vaccine: Introduces a dead or inactive agent into the body, prompting the body to produce antibodies.
Biochemical Analysis
Determines the amount of blood glucose, creatinine, urea, uric acid, transaminases, bilirubin, cholesterol, and triglycerides.