Kira Beukeboom Blog #2 Thursday, March 11, 2010 3/3

overview of class:
-went over our endocrine system exam
-read an article about a fifteen year old girl who had no vagina but got pregnant when she was stabbed in the stomach
-we began reviewing the female reproductive system and wrote some notes on it

thoughts and opinions on material:
   I think the reproductive system unit is amazing because its unreal how every one of us began as a single cell. the female body is incredible in its ability to concieve and grow a whole new human inside of it. i think it may be difficult to learn how all the different hormones cause the female reproductive system to do what it does but it'll be interesting. The reproductive system is an amazing thing and I would think it would be able to withstand lots of stresses but if there is to much stress on the female body will that prevent it from functioning properly or at all? has there ever been a case of conjoined triplets?

above and beyond:
   Studies have shown that women with prolonged disorders like bulemia or anorexia can become sterile. When women starve themselves their menstral cycle eventually stops and if they do this for a long period of time they will eventual become sterile (http://www.freeessays.cc/db/39/pko90.shtml). In third world counties or generally where there has been famine there is often cases of women becoming sterile because of long lasting starvation. There has only been two recorded cases of conjoined triplets but others of triplets where only two of the three are conjoined:
-Unidentified (Sicily, Italy, 1834) 3 boys born with a single torso, two hearts, two stomachs, two lungs & three heads. The case was profiled in Gould & Pyle's Curiosities of Medicine.
-Unidentified (Samsun, Turkey, 1955?) Three heads, two pairs of arms, two pairs of legs; lived for 2 hours. On autopsy four lungs, three livers, three brains, two hearts and two kidneys were found. Information appeared in Sexology Magazine in 1955, they cited the Journal of the American Medical Association for the information.
-There have been 43 sets of triplets born with 2 conjoined. Only 6 of those sets have all three surviving, 17 sets I have no stats on, and the rest had one or both conjoined babies die.
http://www.skewsme.com/img/conjoinedbabies_b.jpg