Physiology at University of Brighton

•To explain and understand how living things work.

•The study of function in the body

•It is particularly based on physics, especially forces, pressures, electricity

•The mechanism by which a disease process causes the organ to fail 

•Explained in terms of physiology (especially physics)

•Type I diabetes – autoimmune destruction of beta cells - insufficient insulin hyperglycaemia - inability of kidney to reabsorb glucose - glucose in urine (symptom) - excess fluid loss into urine (symptom) - loss of glucose - weight loss, hunger, thirst and fatigue (symptoms)

•Homeostasis is the regulation of the cell's or the body's internal environment (= extracellular fluid) so that it tends to maintain a stable, constant condition

•Persistence through change

•Extracellular fluid

•Fluid, electrolytes, extracellular proteins

•Body temperature

•Heart and filling

•Starling's Law

•Pathophysiology of dilated cardiomyopathy

•Physiological

•Weight gain during pregnancy

•Increased heart rate during exercise

•Non-physiological

•Increased blood sugar during diabetes

•Increased body temperature (fever) during a viral infection

Physiological is the healthy and normal state of the body. Non-physiological is either a disease state or happens "unnaturally" in the laboratory

•Expansion of the lung

•Depends on negative pressure in the intrapleural space

•Pathophysiological example is pneumothorax

•The ECG measures the electrical field given off by all the heart muscle cells acting in synchrony

•The ECG can reveal if someone is having a heart attack (ST elevation in myocardial infarct, so called a "STEMI")

•Secretion of acid into the stomach by gastric parietal cells

•ST elevation

Sometimes there are Q waves

It loses its ability to pump because the inner cavity of the ventricular chamber is so large that blood does not stretch the cells during diastole, so (by Starling's law) the muscle does not generate sufficient force/pressure to expel sufficient blood