An 18-year-old female patient

is coming to the emergency office of the Department of Ophthalmology. She is

suffering from significant swelling of the upper eyelid. The eyelid is markedly

swollen, stiff and reddened in one spot. The eyelid is painful and causes

significant tearing of the entire eye. After examination of the eyelid, the

doctor concludes that it is a chalazion (eyelid cyst or Meibomian cyst). It is

an inflammation of the Meibomian gland of the eyelid, which can be seen in the

picture. What type of gland is it with regard to the mechanism of secretion?

A 54-year-old man underwent gastroscopy

(endoscopy of the upper digestive tract) for non-specific digestive disorders.

The oesophagus and stomach appear macroscopically fine, but changes are only

visible in the duodenum, where several samples are therefore taken for

histological examination. The final diagnosis is peptic duodenitis,

inflammation of the duodenum, which is a precursor to the development of the

ulcer. This inflammation is usually caused by the

A new doctor at the Department of Paediatrics

and Inherited Metabolic Disorders gets acquainted with very rare syndromes. He

did not learn much about them in medical school, and because of their rarity,

they are mainly dealt with only by this department. These include rare

congenital disorders of glycosylation. These are diseases whose cause lies in

defects in the enzymes involved in the synthesis of the oligosaccharide chains

of glycoproteins. Glycoproteins are proteins that have oligosaccharide chains

covalently linked to a central protein chain. It is one of the

post-translational modifications of proteins. Most types of these diseases are

associated with neurological disorders, growth retardation, blood clotting

disorders, liver and gastrointestinal tract disease and typically manifest in

the neonatal or infant period. Where do these post-translational modifications

of proteins within the cell most commonly occur?

Arrhythmia, i. e. irregularity of the heart rhythm, can be caused, for

example, by a high or low level of certain ions. Heart muscle cells

(cardiomyocytes) can exchange these ions with each other to maintain

homeostasis. Cardiomyocytes are connected by intercalated discs. What type of

intercellular junction is part of the intercalated discs and used for ion

exchange?

Colchicine is a

highly poisonous alkaloid, originally isolated from crocus. It is a very

effective mitotic poison that attacks the microtubules of the spindle

apparatus, thus disrupting the correct course of mitosis. Some drugs (such as

some chemotherapies) work by a similar mechanism by damaging the function or

structure of microtubules. Which particular process is so disrupted during

mitosis?

A 4-year-old boy has recently returned from a holiday abroad and has now arrived now at the Clinic of Infectious Diseases with his parents due to severe

dehydration caused by diarrhoea. The causative bacterium is

A 54-year-old man has

had issues with increased urinary frequency. More recently, he reports that he

has blood in his urine. Imaging shows a mass growing into the lumen of the

bladder, which is biopsied. Normal tissue adjacent to the mass will be of which

type of epithelium?

A 30-year-old patient underwent a biopsy of the

submandibular salivary gland in the ENT department due to significant swelling

of unclear origin. This eventually proves to be histologically normal. What is

this sample most likely to look like?

A newborn is

diagnosed with congenital deafness due to a defect in an intracellular protein.

This protein is a component of cell-cell junctions that form a pore connecting

the cytoplasm of adjacent cells. Which type of cell-cell junctions is defective in this patient?