ENDOCRINOLOGY

ENDOCRINOLOGY LAB EXERCISE
//How is it that humans and animals maintain quite constant blood concentrations of glucose throughout their lives despite wildly varying frequencies of meals?// If your blood glucose concentration drops much below 1 mg per ml, your neurons will begin to misbehave, leading ultimately to coma and death. Yet skipping breakfast is rarely life-threatening. The answer is that a battery of chemical messengers - //hormones// - are secreted into blood in response to rises and falls in blood glucose concentration and stimulate metabolic pathways that pull glucose concentrations back into the normal range. Two systems control all physiologic processes: As will be repeatedly demonstrated, the nervous and endocrine systems often act together to regulate physiology. Indeed, some neurons function as endocrine cells. Endocrinology is the study of hormones, their receptors and the intracellular signalling pathways they invoke. Distinct endocrine organs are scattered throughout the body. These are organs that are largely or at least famously devoted to secretion of hormones, and no introduction to endocrinology would be complete without some kind of endocrine organ "map" such as that below: Your browser is not Java-enabled: image will not be visible ||
 * [[image:http://arbl.cvmbs.colostate.edu/hbooks/pathphys/endocrine/basics/anim_endo.gif]] ||
 * **The nervous system** exerts point-to-point control through nerves, similar to sending messages by conventional telephone. Nervous control is electrical in nature and fast.
 * **The endocrine system** broadcasts its hormonal messages to essentially all cells by secretion into blood and extracellular fluid. Like a radio broadcast, it requires a receiver to get the message - in the case of endocrine messages, cells must bear a //receptor// for the hormone being broadcast in order to respond.
 * [[image:http://arbl.cvmbs.colostate.edu/hbooks/pathphys/endocrine/basics/anim_nerve.gif]] ||

1.       ===**TARGET CELLS**===

2. ANIMATION OF HORMONE MECHANISMS http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/0072437316/student_view0/chapter47/animations.html#

http://www.sumanasinc.com/webcontent/animations/content/signaling.html

3. [|THYROID HORMONE]

4.  [|THYROID]

[|IP ENDO REVIEW]

[|**IP ENDOCRINOLOGY REVIEW**]