Morphological Patterns of Necrosis

Vocabulary practice flashcards based on the lecture covering necrosis classifications, apoptosis, and cellular stress proteins.

Necrosis

A spectrum of morphologic changes that occur in cells following cell death in living tissue, resulting from denaturation of proteins and enzymatic digestion of organelles.

Coagulative necrosis

One of the five main classifications of necrosis observed in tissues.

Liquefactive necrosis

A classification of necrosis distinguished by the transformation of the tissue into a liquid viscous mass.

Gangrenous necrosis

A classification of necrosis typically used in clinical practice to describe a limb that has lost its blood supply and has undergone necrosis.

Caseous necrosis

A form of necrosis often associated with granulomas; it involves epithelioid cells, lymphocytes, and giant cells.

Enzymatic fat necrosis

A specific classification of necrosis referring to focal areas of fat destruction.

Apoptosis

Distinct from physiological cell death, it is a natural event playing an important role in regulation of normal cell population density, embryogenesis, and hormone-dependent involution.

Morphological features of apoptosis

Includes cell shrinkage, chromatin condensation, the formation of apoptotic bodies, and phagocytosis by neighboring cells.

Heat Shock Proteins (HSPs)

Proteins induced and constitutively synthesized during stressful or injurious stimuli that are essential for cell survival and metabolism.

Chaperonins

Specifically HSP 60 and HSP 70, these proteins are involved in protein folding and targeting proteins to their final destination.

Ubiquitin

A protein that facilitates the degradation of damaged or abnormal proteins by linking enzymes to the protein, making it recognizable by proteases.

Granuloma

A structure associated with caseous necrosis containing epithelioid cells, lymphocytes, and giant cells.