Immunology to me always seemed like an intergalactic battle of starships. Imagine Captain Picard telling Warf to fire the IgM antibodies and to send the interferons to nearest T cells. Then, imagine the Borg germs firing with virions. Tell me this stuff isn?t entertaining. Or I could be watching way too much Star Trek.
CMI is one of the best resources for medical students and those taking undergraduate courses in Immunology. It has a concise, straightforward and clearly illustrated format. It clearly explains experimental observations that form the basis for science of immunology at the molecular, cellular and whole organism levels. It also highlights the implications of immunologic science for the management of human disease. It emphasizes the clinical relevance of the material and this makes it very pertinent for clinical science study. There are hundreds of diagrams, all in color. There are ?need to know? sections in italics that promote rapid reviewing.
I found this book to be quite good and enjoyed reading it. Most of my classmates choose not to use this book but to use Basic Immunology, also by Abbas. I flipped through this book and found it to be too brief and lacking sufficient detail to my liking. So, even though this book is much larger, I think the diagrams are better and the text is more entertaining to read than the smaller book.
How I used this book?
Usually after attending lectures, I would read the appropriate chapters. Reading the chapters took me a few hours, but this was very fast reading. I focused a lot of my attention to studying the diagrams and legends because these were the key to understanding the mechanisms of how the immune system works. I also took notes on the chapters and redrew a lot of the diagrams to explain them to myself. This took a lot of my but I still understand and remember a lot of these basic concepts very well.
The Contents
The chapters is divided into several chapters:
General Properties of Immune Response/cells and Tissues
-This is a very good and useful chapter because it introduces the student to the players of the defensive game: lymphocytes, antigens, antibodies. It describes the types of immunity that our bodies and properties of these different subsystems. It has great diagrsm for describeing the roles of specificity, memory ans self-limitation to immune responses. It has many tables that simply list definitions of these features of Adaptive Immune responses. This is very good because it helps the reader understand the basic principles. Throughout this section there are also many color images and electron micrographs that show the morphologies of the different cells. This is very useful because these images are sometimes shown during board testing.
Antibodies/Antigens/MHC
These chapters have useful diagrams that describe regulation and the role of integrins very well. They show how the integrin present to the low affinity T cells and convert them to high affinity states. They effectively describe the functional T cell response, with costimuli such as B7 and TCR. There are also very good tables to show the principal accessory molecules of the T cells.
Lymphocyte maturation/Activation/Tolerance
I found the diagrams on Ig heavy chain and light chain gene recombination to be a bit confusing and too detailed for the purposes of my classes. The diagrams could be a bit more descriptive to show what happens exactly step by step. The regulation of the rearrangement was very intricate and I gave up trying to understand because it seemed to be a frank mess. The details on the role of experiments for discovering positive selection are not necessary for the medical student and can be omitted.
Cytokines
Here is where a lot of Pathology and Immunology meet and get confusing. There are a lot of cytokines that need to be memorized and keeping them all straight is very difficult.
I think this book did a good job of describing the general properties, both by written descriptions and by diagramming each property. However, the book provided way too much detail on the genes regulating cytokine pathways and production and on signal transduction mechanism of the receptors. This is much more than necessary for medical students.
There is a very good table that lists the cytokines(the major ones, at least), their cell sources and their cell targets. It is very good to memorize because it is high yield material.
Transplant Immunology
This is a rapidly advancing field in medicine. It was only 15 years ago that Murray won the Nobel prize for his work on kidney transplantation. The field has come a long way since then. This chapter helps to outline the immunologic principles of how transplants are possible and how to regulate the body?s immune system to prevent graft failure/rejection. There are very useful diagrams that help to outline the genetics of graft rejection. There are many pathologic slides to help illustrate the different forms of graft rejection and how they have different properties. It is one of the most clinically useful sections of the entire book.
Immunodeficiency/AIDS/Congenital
AIDS is becoming an increasingly global health issue and this book helps the medical student understand it very well. This section also helps the reader to understand that they principal consequence of immunodeficiency is an increased susceptibility to infection. There is a good diagram that shows immunodefiency that develop as a result of failure of cell maturation. There are very useful tables that describe various congenital defects, their functional deficits and mechanisms of the defect. This all represents high yield material.
Overall, I would highly recommend this book to those taking Immunology either in medical school or in undergraduate coursework. In medical school, Immunology is covered in one month. So, a lot of students don?t think it is very time efficient to read this bulky text. For them, I would recommend getting the smaller book by Abbas. However, I liked the style of this book much better. For those who want an even more condensed version, try BRS Microbiology and Immunology. However, if you are interested in the meat of Immunology, get this book!!
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