Endocrine System Essay

1351 Words3 Pages

This essay will review the Endocrine system, its components and its functions. It will also look into how the assessments that practitioners perform on patients relate to the chosen system, and discuss any ethical and practical issues that may arise. I will also go into a brief explanation of the cardiovascular and central nervous systems, and how they interact with the endocrine system. The endocrine system is unique, in the idea that it is made up of glands and hormones rather than just organs. These glands release essential hormones through the bloodstream to other glands, in order to keep a level of homeostasis throughout the body, and to influence cellular activity. These glands are separate from each other and have “no direct anatomical links” (Ross and Wilson, 2003). The system consists of 10 glands; The Pituitary Gland, Thyroid Gland, Parathyroid Glands, Adrenal Glands, the Islets of Langerhans, Pineal Gland, Thymus Gland, The Ovaries and Testes, and the Hypothalamus. Although we mention that the Hypothalamus is part of the endocrine system, it is only connected due to it controlling the Pituitary Gland and its indirect effect on others. The Pituitary Gland and Hypothalamus are connected by nervous and chemical pathways, and are connected by the infundibular stalk, which contains nerve endings from …show more content…

For example, the Islets of Langerhans release Insulin or Glucagon respectively to target Blood glucose levels after eating or if the level of glucose drops from the normal levels of four to seven millimoles. The necessary hormone is carried in the plasma of the blood and carried to the live where it either stores or breaks down Glycogen to increase or decrease Blood Glucose Levels (Warhol,

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