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Mutations In The Human Follicle Stimulating Hormone Receptor Caveolin Interaction Motif Cause Increased Basal Activation, Elizabeth Altman

Honors Theses

Over twelve percent of women aged fifteen to forty-five in America suffer from infertility and/or impaired fecundity and over seven million women have used infertility services, such as intrauterine insemination and in vitro fertilization. Some cases of infertility may be due to dysfunctional human follicle stimulating hormone (hFSH) signaling. hFSH plays a role in spermatogenesis in males, as well as follicle maturation and estrogen production in females. Problems with either hFSH or the hFSH receptor (hFSHR) decrease fertility in males and cause complete infertility in females. As part of the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis, hFSH is released from the pituitary gland and …

The Ketogenic Diet: A Noteworthy Treatment For Pediatric Patients With Refractory Epilepsy, Hannah Christian

Honors Theses

Although epilepsy has been a well-documented neurological disorder for thousands of years, a third of individuals with epilepsy today still have seizures that are not well managed. After the addition of benzodiazepines to other anticonvulsants in the 1950s, doctors have largely focused on treating epilepsy with medications. But, an older treatment has been recently reintroduced into the medical community to help remediate seizure activity. Interestingly, a high fat and low carbohydrate diet regimen called the ketogenic diet has proven to be helpful to some people with refractory epilepsy, that is, epilepsy that does not respond well to medications. In a …

The Theia Soteria: Alternative Design For Safer Initial Entry During Laparoscopic Procedures, Kayla Dubois, Patrick Ryan, Madelyn Joanis

Honors Theses

Laparoscopic procedures account for 15 million surgeries worldwide [1], with the initial entry into the peritoneal cavity accounting for 33-50% of all major laparoscopic complications [7]. This initial entry is the most dangerous as surgeons must enter the cavity using a sharp object with no visibility and space between the outer surface of the cavity and internal tissues. During the initial entry into the peritoneal cavity, the patients undergoing laparoscopic procedures are at a high risk for damage to internal organs and vasculature, necessitating the development of a device to protect these internal tissues and increase patient safety.

Neurosexism: The Extent To Which Sex And Gender Differences In Mental Illness Are Neurologically Explained Versus Socially Constructed, Christie Dionisos

Honors Theses

In the growing age of neuroscience, we are rapidly churning out answers to questions about the mind and mental illness that have always evaded us. While increased neurological understanding is valuable to mental illness, our current understanding of mental illness comes with historical baggage that has negatively shaped society’s beliefs connecting females to illness. Our definitions of mental illness and its association with women came out of a history of stigmatization against women, disease, and Otherness. This has manifested into the pathologization of female experience as mental illness. The onset of new brain science had a similar agenda to make …

Acting Hysterical: Analyzing The Construction, Diagnosis And Portrayal Of Historical And Modern Hysterical Women, Gillian Singer

Honors Theses

Hysterical women’s stories from the 19th and 20th centuries have all too often been ignored and furthermore, invalidated through the capitalization and spectacularization of hysterical women’s experiences. “Acting Hysterical: Analyzing the Construction, Diagnosis and Portrayal of Historical and Modern ‘Hysterical’ Women” aims to acknowledge hysterical women’s narratives by studying the visual documentation of hysterical women. Visual documentation of hysteria began with the photographing of Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot’s “hysterical” female patients and extends to modern cinematic representations from the last two decades of historical and modern hysterical women.

Medical Muses, a book based in years of research by Asti Hustvedt served …

Aphasia & Stutter Therapy: An Ailment Not To Be Treated, Janae Nieto

Honors Theses

This work demonstrates the history of two common speech and communication disorders: aphasia and stuttering. Once considered incurable diseases, these conditions have since generated rich rehabilitation practices and accompanying schools of thought. The first part of the thesis takes up adult aphasia, excluding cases involving speech and communication disorders due to other mental illnesses. The second half of this project conveys the history of stuttering. The majority of the modern cases analyzed in this thesis focus on developmental stuttering in children; although, different forms of stuttering are embedded in the progression of the therapy history. Each chapter includes a section …

The Business Cycle And Health: An Analysis Of How Macroeconomic Conditions Impact Health Outcomes In The U.S., Talitha Kumaresan

Honors Theses

The U.S. spends about twice as much per person on healthcare, yet the disease burden remains higher in the U.S. than in comparable countries (Sawyer and Cox 2018; Sawyer and Gonzales 2017). Although health status is perceived to be an outcome of individual decision making, the business cycle also affects health. While the effect of macroeconomic shocks on health outcomes has been studied extensively, results remain inconclusive. This analysis uses longitudinal data over 30 years and panel data models to examine the effect of macroeconomic conditions on obesity, diabetes, hypertension, depression, congestive heart failure, and heart attack or myocardial infarction. …