Biology Assignment 2022

Running head: BIOLOGY
BIOLOGY
Name of Student
Name of University
Author’s Note

BIOLOGY1
Resetting of the Immune System after a Bone Marrow Transplant
In order to replace the damaged bone marrow, either by any kind of disease or infection,
a medical procedure is performed known as bone marrow transplant. The steps of this procedure
includes the transplantation of the blood stem cells, which then generates new blood cells in the
bone marrow inducing the new marrow’s growth (Townsley et al.). This results in the increased
number of the white blood cells after 15 (approx.) days of the transplant. Although, sometimes
the levels of T cells takes months to meet the healthy levels, as T cells are an important
component of the immune system, thus longer the time taken for T cells production, the body is
exposed to infections for longer time. In the entire response of the immune system against the
harmful microorganisms and the pathogens, the T cells are solely responsible for the response
(Noonan et al.). The response involves two kinds of T cells, helper T cells and cytotoxic T cells.
The chemical signals generated after the microorganism invasion is sent to the cytotoxic T cells
by the helper T cells. The cytotoxic T cells, then recognize and destroys the cells which are
infected. The T cells are designed to recognize the different kinds of threats of the cells present
in the thymus of the body, in which the elimination of T cells progenitors take place that reacts to
the uninfected or normal cells (Sbpdiscovery.org.). Thus different medications are provided to
the patient in order to reset the immune system, so that the new cells being developed by the
WBC are not destroyed by the immune system and thereby protecting the patient from getting
exposed to severe infections (Schneeberger, Stefan, et al.).
The primary source that will be used in this paper is a clinical study that is titled,
“Psychosocial Predictors of Immune Response - Following Bone Marrow Transplantation”. It is
formatted with an abstract, introduction, methods, results, data tables, discussion, and lastly a
lengthy list of references. The introduction of the study provided a clear outline of the Bone

BIOLOGY2
Marrow Transplant process, along with the dos and don’ts of the patients for effective treatment,
the study has discussed about the risks of the infections due to weak immune system responses
along with the other problems which are associated with the Bone Marrow Transplant. In the
method section, Pulgar, et al. has provided a detailed data that were collected from the 31
patients of which 16 patients were males and 15 were females. The methods involves different
sections like the description about the participants, the different psychological measures (the
interpersonal behavior scale, Stressors and Coping Strategies for Cancer Inventory, The Hospital
Anxiety and Depression Scale, Social Support Scale and life orientation test). The methodologies
give a detailed clinical parameters of the transplant response, along with the procedure of the
psychological assessment and its statistical analysis. The explicability of the presentation of the
methods and study established the credibility of the study and maintained the integrity of the
research data.
In the result section, Pulgar et al. has provided few tables for the data collected. The first
table depicts the measurement of the psychological variables along with the standard deviation
scores. The statistics of clinical variables are shown in table two. Lastly, in table three the
immunological response to BMT from the psychological variables is predicted by showing the
stepwise regression analysis results. Pulgar et al. uses the discussion as an opportunity to
summarize their findings as well as relate its relevates to the learning process and the admission
of the fact that there may have been measurement errors when attempting to measure distributed
practice.
The secondary source is an article titled, “He Got Schizophrenia. He Got Cancer. And
Then He Got Cured”; it was written by Moises Velasquez-Manoff and was published by the New
York Times, on September 29, 2018. This article provided a general overview of the case study