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The Mechanism Program At Children 's Hospital

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I’m Kira Keaslov, and I’m currently participating in the Mechanisms program at Children’s Hospital. In the future, I hope to obtain my undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering from Northeastern University, and then pursue a medical degree. This class has helped me gain a better understanding of the molecular basis of disease, and I’m interested in applying this knowledge in a laboratory and clinical setting. A family friend is affected by lupus, and it is a very common autoimmune disease. Therefore, I was always interested in understanding the cause and mechanisms of this disease, and how it affects people. Pitch:
SLE is a very complex disease, and is not fully understood. It affects every aspect of a person’s lifestyle, and there …show more content…

However, in SLE, the goalie starts scoring goals in their own goal, making the body sick without any germs. When this happens, the body reacts in different ways. Sometimes a person’s joints hurt, they have a fever, can be very tired, and they get a rash on their face. This rash is very common in lupus, and helped gave the disease a name. Lupus means “wolf” in Latin, and Rogerius, a doctor in the thirteenth century, believed this rash looked like wolf bites. (Lupus Research Institution) Since lupus is caused from a problem inside the body, it isn’t able to be passed from person to person like an infection such as the flu. But, the problems within the body can sometimes be passed genetically through a family. There are several ways to treat SLE, and they work by calming down the immune system, making it less powerful and stopping it from hurting the body. However, the body still needs the immune system to protect it from outside germs, so sometimes someone who is being treated for lupus can get sick from other illnesses much faster.

Disease Description (Medium Level):
Although this disease has been recognized for many decades, diagnosis was difficult. In the middle ages, SLE was thought to just affect the skin, but in 1872, Kaposi recognized the systemic nature of this disease (History of Disease). The immune system was not understood at that time, so until the discovery of the LE cell by

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