Practical Session 3 – Group 3

Remember that active participation in a reasonable and constructive way during the practical sessions as well as during the lectures scores positively for your final mark.

Lorenzo's Oil (1992)

Lorenzo’s oil is a drama based on real events. It tells the story of Lorenzo Odone who was diagnosed at the age of 5 years (in 1983) a rare and incurable disease, adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD), which causes a degenerative neurological condition leading to death in few years. There was no known treatment at that moment for ALD. The disease results in progressive deafness, blindness and paralysis. Soon after the diagnosis, his parents, with no medical or biochemical background, began a long struggle against illness seeking a treatment to save his son. The film was directed by George Miller, starring Nick Nolte and Susan Sarandon, and was nominated for two Academy Awards: Best Actress in a Leading Role (Susan Sarandon) and Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen (George Miller and Nick Enright).

ALD (also known as X-ALD, X-linked Adrenoleukodystrophy, Adrenomyeloneuropathy, Siemerling-Creutzfeldt Disease or Bronze Schilder Disease) is an X-linked hereditary disease affecting 1 in 20,000 males. It is caused by a deficiency of the protein ALD (ABCD1) whose function is to transport very long chain fatty acids (VLCFA) to the peroxisome for beta-oxidation. The lack of ABCD1 causes an accumulation of VLCFA in different tissues throughout the body, which produces an intense demyelination, leading to the development of severe neurological abnormalities and impaired vision, hearing and motor skills, leading to premature death.

The information about the disease is introduced gradually throughout the film, which contains many dramatic scenes; one of them being the moment in which Dr. Nikolais (Dr. Moser in real life) informs Lorenzo’s parents that the disease is hereditary and transmitted by the mother. The type of inheritance can be seen in the following schematic representation:

Super Size Me (2004)

Super Size Me is a documentary in which Morgan Spurlock investigates the effects of fast food in his own body, eating exclusively at McDonald's 3 times a day during one month. Throughout the experiment, he goes several times to different medical specialists to follow his evolution in terms of weight gain, changes in blood pressure and biochemical analyses. The results are surprising and interesting...

Obesity has become one of the leading causes of death and disability, threatening many of the health gains achieved during the last decades. Despite the alarm raised, the pandemic continues to grow without signs of abatement. The latest prevalence figures in the United States show that more than two thirds of Americans are overweight (68.5%) and 1 in 3 are obese (35.7%). Europe, in general, and Spain, in particular, follow the same trends observed in the USA. The prevalence of obesity in the Spanish adult population over 18 years, according to the results of the ENRICA study, is estimated to be 22.9% globally, being higher in males with 24.4% than in females with 21.4%. In the following video, several interesting numbers about the "weight of the world" are shown: