Posted by My project explains the relationship between smoking and emphysema. I recreated the painting The Broken Column by Frida Kahlo to explain the objective analyze the effects of disease on function and structure of the respiratory system. Frida Kahlo painted The Broken Column to express her experience with chronic pain after spinal surgery. I recreated Kahlo’s painting to show how cigarette smoke travels through the respiratory tract and damages the lungs. The irreversible damage of smoke to the lungs can cause emphysema, a major chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
STEAM Abstract by Ethan Alan Stone
For her STEAM Project, Katrina Bast has chosen the objective “analyze the effects of disease on function and structure of the respiratory system”. More specifically, she has chosen to examine the negative effects of cigarette smoke as it travels through the respiratory tract causing damage to the lungs. As she mentions, this damage may result in emphysema, which is a major chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). To visually demonstrate this topic, she has recreated a painting called The Broken Column by Frida Kahlo. The original piece created by Frida Kahlo represented her experience with chronic pain after a spinal surgery. In contrast, Katrina’s recreation represents a womans stuggle with cigarette addiction and the resulting damage. The woman depicted in Katrina’s drawing is smoking a cigarette with tears rolling down her face. She then uses an X-ray style depiction of her respiratory system to show the internal path of the smoke she is enhaling.
As she mentions in her essay, the molecules inhaled from smoking travel in the upper respiratory tract from the mouth to the oropharynx, the middle region of the pharynx. In her drawing, the smoke molecules are represented by a gray bubble. These molecules travels from the pharynx to the larynx, then through the lower respiratory tract to the trachea. The trachea is lined with ciliated pseudostratified columnar epithelium, but people who smoke lose that cilium. From the trachea, the molecule travels to the bronchial tree and into the lungs.
Katrina chose to complete her STEAM project on emphysema because of her personal connection to the topic. When she was young, her grandfather was diagnosed with emphysema caused by cigarette smoke inhalation.