Breast Areola
In anatomy, an areola, plural areolae is any circular area such as the colored skin surrounding the nipple. Careful inspection of a mature human female nipple will reveal several small openings arranged radially around the tip of the nipple lactiferous ducts from which milk is released during lactation. Other small openings in the areola are sebaceous glands, known as Montgomery’s glands or glands of Montgomery, which provide lubrication to protect the area around the nipple and assist with suckling and pumping of the lactation. These can be quite obvious and raised above the surface of the areola, giving the appearance of goose-flesh. This tissue, in addition to supporting the flow of milk, also bears the brunt of physical stress that the suckling involves.
Another reason for its color comes from an abundance of two polymers: eumelanin the brown pigment and pheomelanin the red pigment. The genetically-directed amount of these pigments determines the color of the areola. They can range from pale yellow to nearly black, but generally tend to be paler among people with lighter skin tones and darker among people with darker skin tones.
Additionally, it has been claimed that a reason for the differing color is to make the nipple area more visible to the infant. An individual’s areolae may also change color over time in response to hormonal changes caused by menstruation, certain medications, and aging. Most notably, the areolae may darken substantially during pregnancy—some regression to the original color may occur after the baby is born, but again, this varies from individual to individual. Human areolae are mostly circular in shape but many women and some men have areolae that are noticeably elliptical. The average diameter of male areolae is around 25 mm 1 in. Sexually mature women have an average of 30 mm 1.2 in, but sizes range up to 100 mm 4 in or greater. Lactating women, or women with particularly large breasts, may have even larger areolae.
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Personalized Medicine
Personalized medicine is a medical model emphasizing the systematic use of information about an individual patient to select or optimize that patient’s preventative and therapeutic care. Personalized medicine is the products and services that leverage the science of genomics and proteomics and capitalize on the trends toward wellness and consumerism to enable tailored approaches to prevention and care.
Over the past century, medical care has centered on standards of care based on epidemiological studies of large cohorts. Personalized medicine seeks to provide an objective basis for consideration of such individual differences. Traditionally, personalized medicine has been limited to the consideration of a patient’s family history, social circumstances, environment, and behaviors in tailoring individual care. Personalized medicine uses new methods of molecular analysis to manage a patient’s disease or predisposition toward a disease.
It aims to achieve optimal medical outcomes by helping physicians and patients choose the disease management approaches likely to work best in the context of a patient’s genetic and environmental profile.
Such approaches may include genetic screening programs that more precisely diagnose diseases and their sub-types, or help physicians select the type and dose of medication best suited to a certain group of patients. Personalized medicine is an extension of traditional approaches to understanding and treating illness. Since the beginning of the study of medicine, physicians have employed evidence found through observation to make a diagnosis or to prescribe treatment. In the modern concept of personalized medicine, the tools provided to the physician are more precise, probing not just the obvious, such as a tumor on a mammogram or cells under a microscope, but the very molecular makeup of each patient. Looking at the patient on this level helps the physician get a profile of the patient’s genetic distinction, or mapping. By investigating this genetic mapping, medical professionals are then able to profile patients, and use the found information to plan a course of treatment that is much more in step with the way their body works. Genomic medicine and personalized medicine use genetic information to prevent or treat disease in adults or their children. Having a genetic map or a profile of a patient’s genetic variation can then guide the selection of drugs or treatment processes.
This can minimize side effects or to create a strategy for a more successful outcome from the medical treatment. Helping the physician cover all the bases is imperative. Genetic mapping can also indicate the propensity to contract certain diseases before the patient actually shows recognizable symptoms, allowing the physician and patient to put together a plan for observation and prevention.
Personalized medicine, when coupled with personal pharmacogenetics, is a unique approach that may be well suited for the health challenges we face in the new millennium. Although the medical and scientific communities, through research and discovery, got the upper hand over many of the diseases we have encountered since the advent of advanced medicine, many diseases that are more complicated.
Diseases like diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and Alzheimer’s are caused by a combination of genetic and other factors. Coupled with the fact that they tend to be chronic, they place a significant burden on not only the patient, but on the healthcare system as a whole. Personalized medicine aims to provide the tools and knowledge to fight chronic diseases and treat them more effectively than ever before. Genetic profiles can help physicians to better discern subgroups of patients with various forms of cancer, in addition to other complex diseases, helping to guide doctors with accurate forms of predictive medicine and preventative medicine. With personalized medicine, the physician is intending to select the best treatment protocol or even, in many cases, avoid passing the expense and risks of unnecessary medical treatments on to the patient altogether. In addition, personalized medicine, when used correctly, aims to guide tests that detect variation in the way individual patients metabolize various pharmaceuticals. Personalized medicine is working to help determine the right dose for a patient, helping to avoid hazards based on familial history, environmental influences, and genetic variation.