L24- Anemias (#6) Flashcards
What is anemia defined as?
Abnoramlly low red blood cell mass
How is anemia determined?
Measuring the packed cell volume (PCV) or hematocrit (HCT) in a whole blood sample
Describe plasma vs serum.
Plasma: watery, straw-colored fluid protion that results after removal of blood cells
Serum: clear, thin, sticky fluid that remains after coagulation of the plasma sample- contains no blood cells or coagulation factors
Anemia is a ________________, but not a disease itself1
Sign of a disease
The most useful approach in the classification of anemia is to determine whether or not evidence of a ___________- response is present in the blood.
Bone marrow
There are two main groups of anemia- what are they?
Regenerative anemias
Non-regenerative anemias
What is regenerative anemias?
Where the body is able to respond appropriately to the decreased red cell mass by increasing RBC production
What is non-regenerative anemia?
Where the body is unable to respond adequately to the increased need for RBCs
what is erythropoiesis?
Production of RBCs in the bone marrow
RBCS are _________- by resident macrophages but _________________ by erythropoiesis (in bone marrow)
Continually destroyed
Continually replaced
When RBCs are in demand, the pluripotent stem cell will receive certain signals that trigger differentiation into a ___________________cell
Erythroid colony-forming unit (CFU)
With each division, the blast cell undergoing multiple rounds of cell divisions gets _______
Smaller
Although the blast cell gets smaller with each dvision, it is however _____________________
Increasing its Hb content
The final stage before becoming an erythrocyte is termed the _____________
Reticulocyte
What are three features of reticulocytes?
- Contain 80% of total Hb present in a mature RBC
- Do not contain nucelus
- 20% larger than mature RBCs due to presence of ribosomes, mitochondria, RNA
When are reticulocytes released when a) in normal condition, and b) in cases of anemia?
Normal condition: takes about 2-4 days for reticulocytes to mature into RBCs
Anemia: Reticulocytes can be released early from the bone marrow
Reticulocytopenia indicates what?
A low number of circulating reticulocytes
What protein hormone stimulates the process of red cell blood produciton?*
Erythropoietin (EPO)
Where is EPO produced? In response to what?
EPO is a growth factor produced in the kidney in response to renal hypoxia
The EPO receptor is located where?
In the bone marrow
EPO levels are ________ in the case of anemia
Increased