Carriage of oxygen and carbon dioxide Flashcards
What are the sites of gas exchange in the body?
- Lungs: between blood and air
- Tissue: between blood and tissue
What process transfers O2 and CO2 into and out of the blood?
- Diffusion
- Pushes molecules from an area of high concentration to low concentration, until an equilibrium is reached
What is diffusion driven by?
- Random elastic collisions between gas molecules (no energy loss)
Why is diffusion very fast in gas exchange?
- Equilibrium is established within 1 second
- gas molecules speed 344ms-1
- collide 10^10 times with each other
What is Henry’s Law
important
- States that the amount of dissolved gas in a liquid is proportional to its partial pressure in the gas form
- C = kP
How is oxygen transported in the blood?
- Dissolved in plasma (2%)
- Bound to Hb (98%)
How does oxygen bind to haemoglobin?
- Reversibly
- 4 O2 molecules per Hb
- 2a + 2B chains, one haem group
- forms oxyhaemoglobin
What is the allosteric effect of oxygen?
- After each successive binding of O2 to Hb, it’s affinity for O2 increases
- cooperative binding
What is the oxygen content of blood?
- total amount of O2 in blood
- 0.3 (plasma) + 19.5 (RBC) = 19.8ml/100ml of blood
- 20% in arterial blood, 15% in venous blood
What is the oxygen carrying capacity of blood?
- maximum amount of O2 that can be carried by Hb
- 1.34 (each Hb) x 15 (Hb content) = 20.1ml/100ml of blood
What is percentage saturation?
- O2 bound to Hb/O2 capacity
- measured using pulse oximeter/SpO2
- arterial blood measured with blood gas analyser/ SaO2
What are some issues of pulse oximeters?
- Measure amount of light absorbed by Hb
- Darker skin
- peripheral perfusion
- restricted blood flow
What are the main points of the Oxygen dissociation curve?
- Sigmoidal: PO2 can fall without much change in saturation
- protection againt altitude + respiratory disease
- P90 = 60mmHg/8kPa of PO2
- P50 = 27mmHg/3.6kPa of PO2
P90/50 = % saturation of Hb
What is right shift in the oxygen dissociation curve?
CADET, face right
- Bohr’s shift
- high altitude, respiratory disease, anemia, exercise
- Decreased affinity of Hb for O2
- ↑CO2, ↑H+ (low pH), ↑2,3-DPG, ↑Temp
Right Releases
What is left-shift in the oxygen dissociation curve?
- Fetal haemoglobin, Myoglobin
- ↓CO2, ↓H+(high pH), ↓2,3-DPG, ↓Temp
- Increased affinity of Hb for O2
in fetal, 2,3-DPG binds poorly to HbF