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What is anemia?
Created by Nauroz Syed.
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- Is polycythemia(too many red blood cells) like a red blood cell cancer that is caused by mutations of the immature RBCs that have the nucleus?(10 votes)
- What will happen if kidneys don't receive enough oxygen?(3 votes)
- If the kidneys do not receive sufficient oxygen, they will release a hormone called erythropoietin (EPO). EPO is used to stimulate the production of more red blood cells, which will in turn hopefully carry more oxygen to the kidneys. This process is controlled by a mechanism called the hypoxic switch. When there is insufficient oxygen to the cells of the kidney, the low oxygen state is sensed, and transcription factors are released that increase EPO production.
If the cell is low or devoid of oxygen for a prolonged period of time, the cell may die. If this happens in a large way, there may be section of the kidney that experience necrosis, or traumatic cell death. There will usually be hematuria or proteinuria in the patient as the damaged kidney tissue drains into the ureter.(8 votes)
- Would having Hemophilia (when your blood doesn't clot) affect how surgery is performed on that certain patient? If so what is done differently?(4 votes)
- Yes there is a difference, good question. Surgeries are very dangerous for these patients, you have to supplement them with coagulation factors before the surgery. You also should have a few liters of transfusions ready during the surgery. Afterwards it is essential to monitor the patient for days. however, one also has to take into account that too much coagulation during and after the surgery is associated with a certain risk of thrombosis which may be deadly as well. i am not a MD or something but i thing to operate on patients with hemophilia is really stressfull and difficult.(3 votes)
- There´s a challenge called "the pass out challenge" or "the knock out challenge" ... do you pass out because your brain doesn´t get enough oxygen??(3 votes)
- Yes these are not games, these are ways that people die since the body will die without oxygen.(4 votes)
- Do blood cells make oxygen and travel to an organ to unload the oxygen and go back to the heart for more oxygen to deliver?(3 votes)
- No - watch the videos on the heart for more information. Basically, the red blood cells pick up oxygen in the lungs and carry it to the rest of the body. The heart just acts as a pump to keep the red blood cells moving.(4 votes)
- Is there a cure for aplastic anemia?(3 votes)
- Bone Marrow Transplantation and some antibiotics to help fight for infections. There is a high survival probability of children to young adults than the older patients.(3 votes)
- can anemia actually kill you?(1 vote)
- Yes and no. The anaemia itself won't be fatal, but if the blood can't carry enough oxygen then there can be problems in other organs like the brain and heart, which can contribute to death from other causes.(4 votes)
- Is surgery able for Anemia?(2 votes)
- I'm don't see how surgery would help anemia, as the problem to begin with is a low red blood cell count, and performing surgery on someone will further reduce their red blood cell count due to bleeding.(2 votes)
- Wouldn't the increase of RBC proction lead to leukemia?(0 votes)
- no not if the increase is controlled as a normal bodily response. In leukaemia there is uncontrolled proliferation and increased speed of differentiation ( so much so that the differentiation for many of the cells can be incomplete) of the progenitor cells into white blood cells.(4 votes)
- when exercising, the tissues need more oxygen. we breathe faster and heart beat faster. the body seems also train up. like, after few months training on long running, your breathe and heart rate are more stable but the muscles are bigger. a bigger muscle should need more oxygen. does it imply the number of red blood cells are more after dedicated exercise(1 vote)
- Yes! The number and efficiency of read blood cells increases as you exercise, because your body suddenly has to transport more oxygen around. Actually, artificially injecting red blood cells into tissues has been used in the Olympics as a method of blood doping to increase athletes performance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_doping(2 votes)
Video transcript
Voiceover: So what if we had
a truck, or a bunch of trucks, and inside the trucks we have boxes and the boxes are carrying money. So we're gonna make this
interesting and we're gonna talk about trucks that are delivering money. And these trucks are being loaded, right, they're being loaded at their warehouse, and from the warehouse
they're shipping out the money to different places, so they're shipping out money
to the government, right because the government needs money, and they're shipping it
out to stores, right, and I don't know to people, right, people, and of course some of the money also has to go back to the warehouse, 'cause all of these entities
from the government, to people to the warehouse need the money to survive, to function. So it's not too hard to understand
this whole set up, right? But it actually bears
a striking resemblance to our own circulatory system. Let's take a look at what our
circulatory system looks like. Well in our blood
instead of having trucks, we have red blood cells, so
that's these things over here. And these red blood cells
carry lots and lots of oxygen. And so the oxygen is kind of
like money in this situation. But the oxygen doesn't just float around in the red blood cell, willy nilly, instead it's really neatly packaged and really neatly bound to hemoglobin. So hemoglobin is this
molecule in the center and you can see that each
molecule of hemoglobin is bound to four molecules of oxygen, ok? And just like the trucks were
loaded up at the warehouse these red blood cells are loaded up with oxygen at a warehouse, of sorts. And so first the red
blood cells are loaded up with oxygen at the lungs, and then after being loaded up, they're sent to the heart which pumps the red blood cells
out to the rest of the body. Ok, so now these red
blood cells are filled up with oxygen which they then deliver to all of the different organs and
tissues throughout the body. So for example, they deliver
oxygen to the brain, right, because the brain needs
lots and lots of oxygen, to the kidneys, to the skin, and of course some of the oxygen or
actually a lot of the oxygen has to come back to the heart
right, and to the lungs. So all of the organs, all of the tissues, all of the cells in our
body absolutely need oxygen to survive and to function, and that's what makes it so important. So that's what the circulatory
system is all about, but let's talk about
the topic of this video, we were suppose to talk about anemia. So what is anemia? Well, anemia is a shortage or a reduction in the number of red blood cells. So there aren't as many red blood cells in the body as we need,
and as you can imagine this leads to a decrease in
the oxygen delivery to tissues. And really it's the decrease
in the oxygen delivery to the tissues that account for all of the symptoms of anemia. So for example, if the
brain, if there is not enough oxygen being delivered to the brain you get symptoms such as fatigue, right, so you start to feel really tired, right. Dizziness, dizziness, a
patient can start to feel really dizzy if their brain
isn't receiving enough oxygen. And it can become really difficult to think and to concentrate, ok. What about if the heart
doesn't receive enough oxygen? Well that leads to chest pain, and as you can imagine chest pain really starts to occur in
situations where the heart is working harder than it usually does. So situations such as exercise, because when we exercise our heart beats not only faster but it beats stronger than it does at rest, and that means that the heart needs more
oxygen than it does at rest. So if the person who is exercising also suffers from anemia,
right, in which there is a reduction the
number of red blood cells and a reduction in the oxygen
being delivered to the heart that can precipitate an
episode of chest pain, and that also happens in
situations of emotional stress because we know that
when we're freaking out our heart starts to beat really fast and of course that means
it needs more oxygen, and again chest pain becomes a problem. And another thing that happens is when there aren't
enough red blood cells the skin starts to appear
pale, and that's called pallor. When the skin kind of loses its
color, that's called pallor. So I made a big fuss, I
made a big deal to say that oxygen is really
important for the functioning and the survival of all
the tissues in the body so you better believe
that the body recognizes immediately when there isn't enough oxygen being delivered to the tissues and it does its absolute best to fix that problem, ok, and it does that in a
bunch of different ways, and I think that it's a
lot easier to understand if we go back to this truck analogy. So what if you were the
manager of this whole system and all of the sudden your customers, the government, stores and the people, weren't getting enough money because there was a shortage in the number of trucks. What would you do? Well you might start off by
saying "Hey we need to increase "the amount of money that we pack "into each of these trucks, so that each "truck is carrying more money" and that would be a great
idea but after a short while you'd recognize that hey
the trucks are packed full of money they can't hold any more. So you gotta come up
with another solution, and that other solution might be to make these trucks drive faster. So you would increase the speed at which these trucks are
traveling so that they can reach the customers more quickly, turn right back around,
get loaded up with money at the warehouse and then
go right back out there to deliver that money once again. So you'd be increasing
the speed of the trucks to increase the amount
of money being delivered per unit time, would also be a good idea. And finally when you have a second you'd get right on the phone with the guy who supplies you with your
trucks and you tell him to increase his production of trucks and send them your way so that you can address the problem at the source, right? Well that's exactly how
our body, I mean exactly how our body deals with
the situation of anemia. So first it addresses
the issue by increasing the amount of oxygen that's
brought into the body. How can we possibly do that? Well we can do that by breathing faster, or increasing our respiratory rate, the rate at which we breathe, ok? Second thing that the
body does is it says hey let's pump out these red blood
cells from the heart faster so that they can deliver
the oxygen to the tissues come right back, get
loaded up in the lungs and then get pumped out again, ok so the heart says I'm gonna send these out with a greater velocity,
I'm gonna pump faster and it increases the heart rate, ok? And then finally the body tries to address the issue at its very core, so it tries to increase red blood cell production, to sort of counteract the anemia, and we'll talk a little bit more later about how that's possible, how you can go about increasing red
blood cell production and whether that works
or not, whether the body responds by making more
red blood cells or not.