20 October

today was a fantastic day due mainly to the fact the bryan and myself met up with a doctor in UCD named "Noor Aman Hamid" mainly I was able to ask him questions from the purely academic research and he was able to clarify a lot of things with his medical knowledge.

topics covered:

hepatic cells(hepatocytes) =

cells the are present in the liver these cells band together and form lobules these then form around each other in the liver and form canals between them these filter all material in the liver down into the bile duct which breaks everything down into bile in conjunction with the gallbladder said bile is then reentered into the liver and gets filtered once more to form true bile.

jaundice : is caused primarily when a block occurs within the bile duct this then causes the bile to back up and go up and under the skin giving it the yellow color with which jaundice is attributed.

jaundice is a chemical entity in that you cannot see jaundice in the liver only the yellow taint in the skin gives it away.

fatty liver : this occurs because the body has a natural build up of both sugar and fat cells the body uses the fat cells to repair any damage caused internally. When large quantities of both sugar and fatty cells are present in the liver the body's natural strategy is the eliminate the sugar based cells first and then progress onto the fatty ones , the problem with this is that is there is excess amounts of the fatty cells the liver can become overwhelmed thus not function at the required pace.

Cirrhosis: with respect to alcohol this mainly occurs when the cells die due to over use and form scar tissue this is dead tissue and cannot be reversed this this then causes the liver to work at a much smaller rate . problems attriubted to this are : permanent jaundice thinning of blood and ascites(build up of internal fluid due to thin blood ) ascites causes abdominal pains and swelling.

so the process of deteriation is as follows :

1) bilirubin is unable to be processed due to excessive quantities

2) jaundice

3) hepatomegaly(liver big)

4) fatty liver

5)Cirrhosis

side notes : this session also got me into thinking perhaps the game may involve other issues ie

the effects on the neuro-system due to alcohol (nerve damage)-> wernicke korsakoff syndrome

with alcohol is early memory lose ie dementia , contant state of drunkeness

possible game design updates :: see pic