Cambridge Chat (previously New Cambridge Students Entry 2004)

Aww bad luck, Willa. Hope you cheer up soon

Just enjoy rowing - it's all that matters, in the end

Speaking of rowing - what are the less-than-1st boat rowers doing in the way of training over the summer? For some reason I've resurrected a chronic injury which means that running/cycling is impossible, and I don't want to do erg as training cus I've only ever done 1 erg and I don't want to develop any bad technique habits...
(was only a novice last term...)
I'm *really* not aiming for a good boat (5th/beer boat...) just want to make myself feel better that not everyone is going to follow their training schedule set by their coaches...?

benet street..where's that? good work on the good room though! I can see the alleyway of Life from my window next year

nah-uh- i can see the wheelie bins on the other side/people staggering home. I'm on the Hobson/King street side of it. Would be soooo good if i could see the queue though

nice work on the room, fab location! ahh you'll be near the Soul Tree/Coco's as well..... more jealous!

Speaking of rowing - what are the less-than-1st boat rowers doing in the way of training over the summer? For some reason I've resurrected a chronic injury which means that running/cycling is impossible, and I don't want to do erg as training cus I've only ever done 1 erg and I don't want to develop any bad technique habits...
(was only a novice last term...)
I'm *really* not aiming for a good boat (5th/beer boat...) just want to make myself feel better that not everyone is going to follow their training schedule set by their coaches...?

If you only want to be 5th boat all your life, the limiting factor of the boat's speed will be technique rather than how fit everyone is, so it will make very little difference whether you go out on a 5 mile run every day or just sit inside watching TV and eating doughnuts .

Need a medic - Helenia?
Out of interest, is diabetes SOLELY genetics? I've always been told you can get diabetes if you have too much sugar and overuse your pancreas or something, which tbh makes sense seeing as you can overuse your kidneys and heart etc. Just an interesting query

Woooo I think I got the job.....and I get to work from home, yipee!

Thanx Visesh and Helenia

Is anything ever purely genetic? It's always enviro and genetic right?

What is an autoimmune disease? Like I gather it's something that makes your immune system attack your own cells, or something like that. How does that arise? Just when something goes wrong in your cells? - like what causes it? Enviromental factors/genetic factors? (probably both eh)

Lol I'm really interested but don't really know what questions to ask!

No, there are some which are purely genetic - Huntington's disease and cystic fibrosis to name just two. Diseases such as diabetes which have a genetic element means that there are some people whose genetic makeup (multiple genes contributing to the tendency) are more likely to develop diabetes but they may or may not depending on a combination of chance and other factors.

Autoimmune diseases are essentially a failure of the tolerance system - lymphocytes are trained to recognised your own cell markers and therefore not attack them, but for some reason (not fully understood) they sometimes go wrong and recognise one of your own cell surface proteins as foreign and launch an attack against them. In diabetes type 1 this is the case - they recognise something on the surface of pancreatic beta cells (can't remember what) and cause these cells to be destroyed. This means no insulin production.

Type 2 diabetes is different and is not auto-immune related; it's simply due to a decreased production of insulin combined with increased resistance to it.