Learning the Interleukins

[Salient]

Just about every time these come up in class my brain shuts off and my eyes glaze over. I know there are a few mnemonics out there but they disagree with each other, are massively oversimplified, only deal with a few, and don't help me at all with the majority of areas they show up.

Is there a decent way to learn the high-yield facts in a way other than brute-force memorization? If I'm going to take the time to learn them, I'd rather do it in a way I can understand and retain.

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[image187]

hmmm... I think you just gotta memorize the important ones, just like il1 through 12, but just their main function and nothing really else.. I know it sounds really silly but you'll eventually know them second nature and you won't need a mnemonic for them.

 

[Salient]

I was hoping for a more intuitive way to learn them, because they keep showing up in pathophys in unexpected ways and I feel like it's impossible for me to remember all of those bits without some sort of deeper unifying understanding. I have a very hard time retaining things that I can't weave into a story somehow, and I don't like using mnemonics if I can avoid it because then I'm not really learning anything other than a list of de-contextualized buzzwords.

 

[Charles_Carmichael]

To be honest, they've popped up so frequently that I've kind of memorized them without really trying to. Seems like they pop up in every other chapter in Pathoma or RR or something. It helps to associate them with certain disease states (ex. in mixed-cellularity Hodgkin's lymphoma, you see lots of eosinophils because the Reed-Sternberg cells are producing IL-5; thus, IL-5 is associated with eosinophils). Wish I had something better to offer. Sorry!

 

[jsp132]

in my immunology just brute force memorization and also drawing out pictures helped

ie

TH2 have il 4 and il5 for b cell proliferation

TH1 have il 2 for t cell proliferation etc

 

[OveractiveBrain]

Just about every time these come up in class my brain shuts off and my eyes glaze over. I know there are a few mnemonics out there but they disagree with each other, are massively oversimplified, only deal with a few, and don't help me at all with the majority of areas they show up.

Is there a decent way to learn the high-yield facts in a way other than brute-force memorization? If I'm going to take the time to learn them, I'd rather do it in a way I can understand and retain.

A. You do not need them after Step 1
B. IL-1, IL-6 and TNF-alpha are the big dogs.
C. May not be worth the squeeze in way of juice for the exam; there are plenty more fruitful things to do with your memory. If you are having trouble, take the hit on the rare ones, and know the common ones. And by common, I mean the ones commonly tested.

 

[Salient]

A. You do not need them after Step 1
B. IL-1, IL-6 and TNF-alpha are the big dogs.
C. May not be worth the squeeze in way of juice for the exam; there are plenty more fruitful things to do with your memory. If you are having trouble, take the hit on the rare ones, and know the common ones. And by common, I mean the ones commonly tested.

Good to know, thanks. IL-1 and TNF-alpha are hard to forget because they come up all the time and usually in the same context. All of the others just blur together. I think I'm fine missing a couple questions on Step I if I don't need to know the others later and I can devote that energy to learning other things well that I WILL need later.

 

[Zzmed]

You shall study immuno from a source that gives you interleukins bit by bit and repeatedly, like a story line... and in the end summarizes them into a table. In this way they 'll stick to your brain without knowing it..

I suggest the Immuno part from Levinson's book. Pretty concise and to the point with many helpful tables... (Actually, it seems to me that this book is the one that FA immuno section is based on).

And if they keep popping up in any subject other than immuno,like Path or Phys, you just go back and refresh them.

So no mnemonics needed. I don't say they 're not helpful but they 're not so effective on the long term.