Some questions [Archive]

Rolfe

10th June 2004, 02:37 PM

Originally posted by Kumar
Hello all,

I really want to know the followings:-

1. What is the chemical composition/formula of 'ALKALINE PHOSPHATASE & ACID PHOSPHATASE? Frankly, I want to know chemical composition of all body secretions.

2. In diabetes, is it the concentration of blood(thickening of blood) due to excess sugar & lipids etc. which can create diabetic complications or if sugar causes toxic effect? However sugar is our simplest food then can it be toxic directly?

Thanks. Touch. Barge-pole. Not.

Kumar, I've shown you this link before. Buy this if you possibly can (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0716746840/qid=1086900631/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_10_1/026-8959765-6205217).

Or some people recommend this one instead (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0716743396/qid=1086900774/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_3_1/026-8959765-6205217) - just get yourself a good book and read it.

Rolfe.

Badly Shaved Monkey

10th June 2004, 02:51 PM

Originally posted by Rolfe
Touch. Barge-pole. Not.

Kumar, I've shown you this link before. Buy this if you possibly can (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0716746840/qid=1086900631/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_10_1/026-8959765-6205217).

Or some people recommend this one instead (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0716743396/qid=1086900774/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_3_1/026-8959765-6205217) - just get yourself a good book and read it.

Rolfe.

I'll give you a clue, Kumar.

The phosphatases are enzymes,

enzymes are proteins.

What are proteins, Kumar?

There is no useful meaning for you to be found in their chemical composition,

you need to read a book.

Kumar

10th June 2004, 09:54 PM

Thanks for just comments.

BSM, Their definitions are given on several sites but its chemical formula is not given like insulin. Frankly, I want to understand how it is alkaline or acid.

What about second question? Is there any test which shows concentration of blood i.e. whether it is thick or thin?

Zep

10th June 2004, 10:18 PM

Blood is thicker than water.

flume

10th June 2004, 11:18 PM

Originally posted by Kumar Frankly, I want to understand how it is alkaline or acid. It has to do with the optimal pH range for the activity of those types of enzymes. The acid phosphatases work at acid pH; the alkaline phosphatases work at alkaline pH. I don't what the preferred pH ranges are for the ones in humans.

Kumar

10th June 2004, 11:33 PM

flume thanks, can you bit more explain it?

Corallinus

11th June 2004, 01:24 AM

7.35 - 7.45. It is a very narrow margin.

Anders

11th June 2004, 02:56 AM

Originally posted by Kumar
Thanks for just comments.

BSM, Their definitions are given on several sites but its chemical formula is not given like insulin. Frankly, I want to understand how it is alkaline or acid.

What about second question? Is there any test which shows concentration of blood i.e. whether it is thick or thin? Well, an alkanline compound contains an alkaline spicies, such as Cl, Br, etc. An acid usallualy contains protons, thats H+ or H3O+, that can be donated to a base. It can also just be a compound that donates a electron pair. Which it is, dependes on which acid/base defintion you are using.

Rolfe

11th June 2004, 02:59 AM

Kumar, you're trying to cherry-pick small (and poorly understood) snippets of biochemistry and physiology in the hope of being able to twist something into support for your beloved Tissue Remedies.

This is hopeless. If you want to understand physiology and biochemistry you have to learn the subjects as a whole. As BSM already said, there's nothing particularly difficult about it.

Suddenly jumping in with questions about acid and alkaline phosphatases (without apparently understanding that these are enzymes and the acid/alkaline bit refers to the pH of optimum activity), combined with "thickness" of the blood (what on earth do you mean by thickness? PCV?), is completely pointless and is going to get you nowhere.

You need to understand the subject at a basic level.

Rolfe.

Anders

11th June 2004, 03:15 AM

Originally posted by Rolfe

This is hopeless. If you want to understand physiology and biochemistry you have to learn the subjects as a whole. As BSM already said, there's nothing particularly difficult about it.

Well, beeing a biochemistry student myself, I can say that biochemistry is really quite hard though. But I agree with that the basics are quite easy to learn. But a firm knowledge in basic chemstry is essential. Not knowing what a phosfate or an alkanline is, would be a real problem in biochemistry studies, certainly a show stopper!

Prester John

11th June 2004, 03:18 AM

What about second question? Is there any test which shows concentration of blood i.e. whether it is thick or thin?

A typical haematology analyser will give you the following information:

White Cell count
Neutrophil Count
Lymphocyte count
Monocyte count
Eosinophil count
Basophil count
Red Cell count
Haemoglobin concentration
Haematocrit
Mean (red) cell volume
Mean (red) cell haemoglobin
Platelet count
platlet volume

and a few more that i can't recall..

Kumar

11th June 2004, 03:46 AM

PS, how it will show that blood is thicker or thinner( more/less concentrated in general).

Blood is composed of:-

Formed Elements ( RBCs, WBCs & Platelets): 37-54%

Plasma: 46-63%

What will make blood more concentrated or thicker & if thicker blood is likely to create complications in diabetic patients or just high sugar?

Prester John

11th June 2004, 03:52 AM

I don't think thick or thin blood is a medical (haematological) diagnosis but i could be wrong.

Rolfe

11th June 2004, 03:54 AM

Haemoconcentration mainly affects those elements of the blood which are not freely diffusable throughout the extracellular fluid. That is protein (total protein, albumin and globulin) and the red cells. White cells don't as a rule show much effect, and although you can demonstrate that enzyme activities increase slightly, this is insignificant.

So, total protein, albumin and globulin will all increase in proportion, and PCV (and of course red cell count and haemoglobin) will increase, also in proportion.

This scenario refers to deficiency of water in the plasma/ECF. The ill-defined concept of the blood "thickening" can also refer to various forms of absolute polycythaemia, including polycythaemia vera, erythropoietin-producing neoplasms of the kidney, and secondary polycythaemias due mainly to certain cardiac or respiratory diseases. Hormonally-related polycythaemias (for example Cushing's disease) are generally milder and of less relevance to this question.

Is there any actual point to this question?

Rolfe.

The Don

11th June 2004, 04:06 AM

Of course,

The expectation of tissue salts (through CPE) cause the stomach's pH to change. This in turn causes the blood to be more (or less - I forget) concentrated resulting in a rise (or is it fall ?) in effective blood sugar levels.

This is the meachnism by which tissue salts (and hence all homoeopathic remedies) work. Where my $1,000,000 for the seed ?

MRC_Hans

11th June 2004, 04:25 AM

Originally posted by Kumar

What will make blood more concentrated or thicker & if thicker blood is likely to create complications in diabetic patients or just high sugar? High levels of RBC like when taking EPO, dehydration, and adrenalin are some things that will make blood thicker. Anemia (sp?) and certain medicines are things that makes blood thinner.

There in no direct correlation between diabetes complications and blood thickness, but diabetes increases the risk of CHD, and that can be countered by giving blood-thinning medicine.

Hans

Kumar

11th June 2004, 04:30 AM

Originally posted by Prester John
I don't think thick or thin blood is a medical (haematological) diagnosis but i could be wrong. PJ,

It looks to me also, similarily. Don't you feel it is important?

We can divide & discuss this concept for: whole blood, formed elements, plasma & serum.

Differant levels of differant substances in blood is given at:

Formed Elements: As in 'CBC' test:

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/003642.htm

Serum: As in 'Chem 20' test:

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/003468.htm

But some substances are measured in units & other on weight basis making it difficult to judge.

Kumar

11th June 2004, 04:39 AM

Rolfe, Mr.Hans,

Don't you feel/find that body's natural systems tries to balance this concentration or thickness/thinness of blood(alongwith its pressure) unabling blood to reach everywhere in case of several complications ? Do we interfere in this natural process by medications to avoid slight risks at some other cost?

Rolfe

11th June 2004, 04:50 AM

Originally posted by Kumar
Don't you feel it is important?

Differant levels of differant substances in blood is given at:

Formed Elements: As in 'CBC' test:

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/003642.htm

Serum: As in 'Chem 20' test:

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/003468.htm

But some substances are measured in units & other on weight basis making it difficult to judge. Kumar, there are numerous books about this. Heck, I wrote one myself. Its second edition runs to over 350 pages. I've also written many short articles about the subject.

But all of these books and articles assume a basic understanding of biochemistry and physiology. Trying to understand clinical biochemistry and haematology (which is what you are referring to) without this basic knowledge is really impossible. Constantly trying to educate someone who picks up little isolated ideas and then tries to twist them into support for this fantastical and unfounded tissue remedies caper is getting a bit wearing, I have to say.

Rolfe.

The Don

11th June 2004, 04:57 AM

Originally posted by Rolfe
Constantly trying to educate someone who picks up little isolated ideas and then tries to twist them into support for this fantastical and unfounded ............... getting a bit wearing, I have to say.
Is this how some homoeopaths feel about people coming to their boards and asking them to substantiate their claims and picking away at the edges of their belief.

Is this why they keep asking skeptics to read the texts ?

Of course it doesn't account for how badly they behave to those who have and the lack of consistncy in their beliefs/treatments

Rolfe

11th June 2004, 05:00 AM

Originally posted by Kumar
Don't you feel/find that body's natural systems tries to balance this concentration or thickness/thinness of blood (along with its pressure) unabling blood to reach everywhere in case of several complications ? Do we interfere in this natural process by medications to avoid slight risks at some other cost? Kumar, you are talking about my own specialist subject here. It has taken me many years to understand it as well as I do. I used to teach it to university students, and it took two terms of lectures to cover, and that was to people who already had basic courses in biochemistry and physiology. You are trying to run before you can walk. You will never understand the things you are trying to talk about until you do some basic studying.

Of course the body is constantly trying to maintain homoeostasis in the blood and ECF. Indeed that can be a problem in that blood concentrations of a certain constituent may be normal because the body is trying very hard to keep them that way even although there is an overall abnormality.

But do you really think that medication is just given blindly without considering all this stuff? We "interfere" because on balance we believe that the benefits will outweigh any risks that might be present. It can be a complex decision at times, but when these decisions are made, all aspects of the question are taken into consideration.

Kumar, you need to study basic biological sciences. You have a healthy curiosity on the matter which would stand you in great stead. If you could only give up this idea of trying to justify Tissue Remedies and go seeking knowledge for its own sake, I think you might be very surprised by what you'd find out.

Rolfe.

MRC_Hans

11th June 2004, 05:00 AM

Originally posted by Kumar
Rolfe, Mr.Hans,

Don't you feel/find that body's natural systems tries to balance this concentration or thickness/thinness of blood(alongwith its pressure) unabling blood to reach everywhere in case of several complications ? Do we interfere in this natural process by medications to avoid slight risks at some other cost? The body's natural reactions are not always beneficial. Stress is a good example: Stress induces changes in the body that gives us an increased short-term ability to handle a crisis, but the long-term effects can be lethal. So sometimes we interfere with the process, in order to change the balance of risks. Whether this is always justified can no doubt be debated, but generally such benefits are carefully weighed by professionals.

Hans

Rolfe

11th June 2004, 05:05 AM

Originally posted by The Don
Is this how some homoeopaths feel about people coming to their boards and asking them to substantiate their claims and picking away at the edges of their belief.

Is this why they keep asking skeptics to read the texts ?To some extent, possibly yes.

But I don't think it's quite the same. We've all spent considerable time trying to give Kumar reasonable answers, but no matter what he simply comes back with a poorly-understood concept and asks if it might be related to the efficacy of tissue salts. After a while one starts to feel like a worn record.

Maybe it's all a matter of perspective, but it seems to me that if you ask a clear and sensible question here you'll get an answer. What seem to me to be clear and sensible questions on the homoeopathy boards don't get clear and sensible answers.

Rolfe.

Kumar

11th June 2004, 05:08 AM

Originally posted by Rolfe
Kumar, there are numerous books about this. Heck, I wrote one myself. Its second edition runs to over 350 pages. I've also written many short articles about the subject.
Rolfe,

I am happy to know this & hope you will tell more on this topic.

Lipids & sugar in blood is considered as a matter of great concern. But if blood concentration is important & relevant to the main cause of complications then why it is not related to protiens, hemoglobins &/or formed elements which are more concentrated in blood than lipids & sugar?

Rolfe

11th June 2004, 05:20 AM

Originally posted by Kumar
But if blood concentration is important & relevant to the main cause of complications then why it is not related to protiens, hemoglobins &/or formed elements which are more concentrated in blood than lipids & sugar? Back to "IF" again, Kumar. What are you talking about? Some sort of clue would be nice. I'm not aware that dehydration is a more important concern in diabetology than glycaemic control.

Rolfe.

Rolfe

11th June 2004, 05:30 AM

OK, here is the first half-page or so of the section on clinical biochemistry. It might be helpful for Kumar to think about these concepts.Basic Principles of Plasma Biochemistry

The plasma is basically extracellular fluid on the move, with added protein to retain water in the circulation (by raising the osmotic pressure). It transports a large number of substances from sites of absorption or production to sites of utilisation or excretion and contains many other substances which are essential in precise concentrations for the proper function of the ECF. Therefore, analysis of plasma samples can provide a variety of types of information.

Interpretation of plasma biochemistry results is really specific to each particular constituent, but there are certain basic principles which can be followed. An understanding of these is helpful when tackling the subject for the first time, and can be especially useful when trying to make sense of a puzzling or unusual result. The first thing to consider is the reason for the particular substance being present in the plasma. Is its primary purpose to be in the plasma (albumin, electrolytes)? Is it being taken to somewhere it is needed (glucose, hormones)? Is it a waste product on its way to being excreted (urea, creatinine, bilirubin)? Or is it present in the plasma accidentally (most enzymes)? The next thing to think about is where exactly is this substance coming from, and where is it going to - in other words, what are the mechanisms responsible for its addition to and removal from the plasma, both normal and abnormal, and how are they controlled? From there it is not difficult to work out the possible reasons for abnormal concentrations. Abnormally low concentrations may be due to decreased addition to the plasma (impaired synthesis, nutritional deficiency, poor absorption, lack of precursors, etc.) or to accelerated removal from the plasma (excessive demand, increased excretion, pathological losses, etc). Abnormally high concentrations may be due to increased addition to the plasma (increased production or intake, pathological leakage from the intracellular compartment, etc.) or decreased removal from the plasma (decreased utilisation, impaired excretion, etc.). Also, remember that a disturbance of the normal homeostatic mechanisms may be involved in many cases.Rolfe.

Kumar

11th June 2004, 05:48 AM

Originally posted by Rolfe
I'm not aware that dehydration is a more important concern in diabetology than glycaemic control.

Rolfe.

Rolfe, thanks for the quote. Please tell me that, whether measurement of thickness or thinness of blood, plasma or serum is important or not? What are the tests which measures the same?

Badly Shaved Monkey

11th June 2004, 06:05 AM

Originally posted by Kumar

Rolfe, thanks for the quote. Please tell me that, whether measurement of thickness or thinness of blood, plasma or serum is important or not? What are the tests which measures the same?

Do you mean viscosity or osmolality?

Badly Shaved Monkey

11th June 2004, 06:21 AM

Originally posted by The Don

Is this how some homoeopaths feel about people coming to their boards and asking them to substantiate their claims and picking away at the edges of their belief.

Is this why they keep asking skeptics to read the texts ?

Of course it doesn't account for how badly they behave to those who have and the lack of consistncy in their beliefs/treatments

Following on from Rolfe's reply, a major point is that real science and medicine are actually quite difficult: we don't have a handle of every fundamental concept and there is a lot of stuff to learn.

Homeopathy by contrast only appears diffiult to its insiders who cannot see the wood for the trees. Their fundamental concepts are set in stone by their canonical authors. All the complexity springs from those simple stems. However, we know those stems are faulty, so we can cut away all the complexity with a few simple strokes at the base of their system. It doesn't matter to us that some homeopaths work by a 'layers' method, or that some remedy has been arbitrarily identified as an antidote to another so that this linkage must be learned.

We are not therefore uninitiates picking at the edges. We know more than they do and are cutting at their core beliefs.

That is what makes them feel threatened by questioning, because there are avenues down which they cannot go and so they do not attempt to answer these questions. By contrast Kumar's is not attacking our core beliefs and we can answer his questions all day long and still know for sure that he will not back us into a corner. If he tried to attack some kind of core belief, say the Laws of Thermodynamics or the need for controlled observations to determine causality, then we can easily refute anything he says and someone wold probably put in the effort to do so instead of trying to ban him or divert his threads to a side forum where they can be ignored.

Rolfe

11th June 2004, 06:56 AM

Originally posted by Kumar
Please tell me that, whether measurement of thickness or thinness of blood, plasma or serum is important or not? What are the tests which measures the same? You have to say what you mean by thickness or thinness. These are not medical, biochemical or haematological terms.

Are you talking about relative polycythaemia/dehydration?

Rolfe.

Rolfe

11th June 2004, 07:10 AM

OK, on the assumption that you're talking about relative water content of the blood, here goes.

Only the plasma proteins and the red cells are important in assessing the degree of hydration/dehydration. Everything else is too freely diffusable into other compartments and/or under too strict homoeostatic control.

Theoretically, the red cells are the best measurement, as they do not diffuse into the interstitial fluid at all. This is probably true in man, where there is no contractile spleen to complicate the issue. However, most other animals have a contractile spleen and when they are stressed (say by collecting a blood sample!) this will inject more red cells into circulation. This causes the red cell count (usually measured as the PCV but you can use haemoglobin or red cell count as such if you want) to increase even in the absence of water loss.

In contrast there is no reservoir of proteins waiting to be introduced into the blood. Therefore, even though the plasma proteins are to some small extent diffusable into the ICF, measurement of total protein or albumin may be a better measure of hydration especially in animal patients. There will be a slight underestimation involved here, however, due to the degree of diffusability.

There is also the complication that other pathology directly affecting the red cells or the proteins may alter their concentrations and so complicate interpretation. For example, a patient with anaemia or a protein losing enteropathy may still have low PCV or low proteins even when significantly dehydrated - just not as low as they were before.

There is also the question of the baseline value. If one doesn't know what was "normal" for that patient before the abnormality occurred it can be more difficult to assess the situation. In this situation the analyte with the narrowest reference range can become more important as it is easier to tell how far from "normal" the patient's result is. This is often total protein or albumin.

In practice one tends to measure both the PCV and the proteins and interpret all the figures in the light of all the clinical findings (including clinical evidence of dehydration such as skin tenting) when assessing the situation. Also, as series of measurements can be more helpful than a single value.

PCV (haemoglobin, red cell count) is measured on whole blood. Total protein and albumin are measured on either plasma or serum. The only difference there is that the total plasma protein will be some 2-5 g/l more than the total serum protein because plasma still has fibrinogen in it while serum has had the fibrinogen removed during the clotting process.

Rolfe.

Kumar

11th June 2004, 10:12 AM

Rolfe,

Thanks for informative posting. I think PCV & Hematocrit are the same. It means plasma proteins and the red cells are practically more important in assessing the degree of hydration/dehydration or blood concentration. Other constituents like gulucose, lipids, fibrinogen are not of much importance for this purpose. Under this consideration, we can take that if plasma proteins and the red cells in blood are normal then the blood concentration should be normal.

All these aspects also suggest that high blood sugar and/or lipid levels do not effect due to somewhat thickning of blood concentration( and so blood circulation problems), but they will be considered toxic in themselves. Am I right?

Rolfe

11th June 2004, 10:54 AM

Originally posted by Kumar
All these aspects also suggest that high blood sugar and/or lipid levels do not effect due to somewhat thickning of blood concentration( and so blood circulation problems), but they will be considered toxic in themselves. Am I right? YES! Pretty much. (And yes, PCV and haematocrit mean exactly the same thing, they're interchangeable terms. Use either one.)

It would help if you tried to avoid unscientific terms like "thickening" or "thinning" of the blood. However, yes, small molecules like glucose and even the lipids (which aren't necessarily that small but never mind that right now) are relatively unaffected by dehydration/haemoconcentration.

In part this is because glucose is freely diffusable out of the circulation, in part it's because glucose concentration is quite closely regulated so if it did appear to go up the homoeostatic mechanisms would kick in, and in part it's because of something I didn't mention before.

That extra point is proportional change. If you think about it, 10% dehydration is quite a lot. Now a change in total protein of 10%, say from 75 g/l to 82 g/l, is enough to notice, within the parameters that analyte tends to vary within. Same for PCV - an increase from 0.50 to 0.55 is appreciable. (But even here, if you're familiar with the behaviour of the analytes, you can start to see the advantages of looking at the total protein - the reference range is narrower and an increase of 7 g/l is quite a lot in real terms, so if all you have is the second result it's easier to appreciate from the alone that there's an abnormality.)

However, an change in plasma glucose concentration from say 5.0 mmol/l to 5.5 mmol/l is very little in real terms. The sort of thing that might happen after a snack, or in an animal, due to the stress of being handled. So even discounting the question of diffusability of the small molecule and homoeostatic control of concentration, it wouldn't show any really appreciable effect of haemoconcentration.

Understanding this does tend to require some appreciation of the range of abnormal values an analyte can display as well as the reference range. But when you think that glucose isn't considered interesting until it's over 7 mmol/l even in man, and nobody is sure about diabetes until it's over 11 mmol/l, and 25 mmol/l isn't unusual in an uncontrolled diabetic and you can get bad frights by discovering numbers up to 40 or 50 mmol/l when a really bad case is presented, then that puts 5.5mmol/l versus 5.0 mmol/l a bit into perspective.

In contrast there isn't a huge hypothetical tower of high results due to common pathologies lurking off-stage for either PCV or total protein. Yes, absolute polycythaemias do happen as I said before, and sepsis and even paraproteinaemia will cause the total protein to increase (but not the albumin, which makes measuring both a good idea), but these are relatively easy to spot and discount, and in the grand old scheme of things a 10% increase in PCV or a protein measurement is significant enough to be clinically useful.

(In contrast, consider the enzymes, which are also proteins and so essentially not really diffusable, and are not homoeostatically regulated at all. Their reference ranges and pathological ranges are so wide that a 10% increase is nothing, and you simply couldn't look at a single result and deduce anything about state of hydration.)

In summary, the pathological changes you see in things like glucose are so much larger than anything dehydration might cause that there is generally no doubt at all that there is something other than fluid shifts causing the abnormality.

Rolfe.

Kumar

11th June 2004, 11:29 PM

Rolfe thanks again for informative posting. Have we assesed how imbalance sugar/lipids create adverse effects and complications--if it is not much related to hamoconcentration & circulatory defects? Do our blood maintain homostatis in its concentration & if it is, will it be just on the basis RBCs & protiens changes? Btw, can we get RBCs, WBCs & platlets calculation on their average weight basis?

Corallinus

12th June 2004, 02:25 AM

Kumar,

Your body is always looking to maintain homeostatis all the time and it is a fine balancing act. Mostly this is done by means of negative feedback loops, but sometimes by positive feedback.

The amount of RBC's and WBC's is the amount circulating in the blood at the time and these levels are measured. It is not done by weight, although RBC's and WBC's differ in their structure because they are specialised cells they have adapted to their function.

Kumar

12th June 2004, 02:49 AM

Originally posted by Corallinus
Kumar,

Your body is always looking to maintain homeostatis all the time and it is a fine balancing act. Mostly this is done by means of negative feedback loops, but sometimes by positive feedback.

The amount of RBC's and WBC's is the amount circulating in the blood at the time and these levels are measured. It is not done by weight, although RBC's and WBC's differ in their structure because they are specialised cells they have adapted to their function. Hello Corallinus,

But since RBCs are major constituent of blood, how can we know concentration of blood without knowing their weight? We also need the same to compare these with other constituents of blood which are measured on weght basis?

Rolfe,
Frankly, I want to know normal values of major constituents of blood on weght basis to understand flow of blood. This will help us to compare differant constituents for this purpose.
Can you also tell me that if insulin in blood is freely diffusable into other compartments and/or so under too strict homoeostatic control or not?

BSM, I think osmolality (concentration of particles) of blood(not serum) on weght basis can be a better indication of concentration or thick/thin blood & of flow of blood.

Rolfe

12th June 2004, 05:35 AM

Originally posted by Kumar
But since RBCs are major constituent of blood, how can we know concentration of blood without knowing their weight? We also need the same to compare these with other constituents of blood which are fuge the blomeasured on weght basis?You count them, in an electronic impedance counter. And you centrifuge the blood very fast in a microhaematocrit centrifuge and measure the proportion of this occupied by red cells (the PCV). And you lyse the blood and measure the concentration of haemoglobin, in g/100ml (or g/l if you're really up to the minute). Then you can do various calculations which let you figure out the mean corpuscular haemoglobin (in pg), the mean corpuscular haemoglobin concentration (in g/100ml or g/l) and the mean corpuscular volume (in fl).Originally posted by Kumar
Frankly, I want to know normal values of major constituents of blood on weght basis to understand flow of blood. This will help us to compare differant constituents for this purpose.Kumar, I've given you links to books about this already. It's a whole subject of study at university level. You can't come on to a bulletin board and ask for an entire university course to be spoon-fed to you.

I spend all my working time comparing different constituents analysed in blood samples, for the purpose of diagnosing and managing illness. It's a specialised field. I've tried to give you the individual bits of information you asked for, but you can't expect anyone here to tell you all about diagnostic clinical biochemistry in a forum reply. It's just not practical.

Face it, you can't short-cut an education. You can't aspire to understand the meaning of the concentrations of different blood constituents without doing the basic study of biochemistry we've been urging you to undertake for months. I can answer specific questions for you, but I can't impart my entire body of professional knowledge like this.

Oh, and another thing. Don't even think about doing any of this on a weight basis. Yes a few analytes do have to be measured this way because they don't have a uniform molecular weight (principally total protein, and because of this also albumin and haemoglobin to make the playing field level), but modern clinical biochemistry measures these things on a molar (molecular) basis. You may have noticed that the glucose concentrations I gave you were in mmol/l. This is much more meaningful that knowing how many grammes you have, and it is the way it has been done for 30 years now. (Well except in America, where they're being unbelievably old-fashioned about it and don't yet seem to have figured out how to do the sums, but we don't pay any attention to them.)Originally posted by Kumar
Can you also tell me that if insulin in blood is freely diffusable into other compartments and/or so under too strict homoeostatic control or not?Insulin is a hormone which is responsible for the homoeostatic control of glucose levels in the blood. Insulin is the only hormone which decreases blood glucose (by facilitating its entry into the cells), while a number of hormones will increase blood glucose, by increasing glycogen mobilisation and gluconeogenesis (including glucagon, adrenaline, cortisol and growth hormone). So insulin is part of the regulatory process, and as such it is not itself independently regulated.Originally posted by Kumar
BSM, I think osmolality (concentration of particles) of blood(not serum) on weght basis can be a better indication of concentration or thick/thin blood & of flow of blood.Oh, BSM can do this one, it's Saturday! My brain's spinning. You don't measure osmolality on a weight basis for a start.

Rolfe.

Kumar

12th June 2004, 06:00 AM

Rolfe,

Thanks for the reply. You habe tried your best. But frankly 'flow of blood in blood vessels depending on its concentration' can really be important to understand. Accordingly, how we judge its concentration is also important. Probably, it can be possible if major constituents of blood can be known & compared on weight basis. But I think volume of any constituent can also be important because suppose a constituent is lighter in weight but of bigger volume then it can probably also effect circulation & blood pressure. It looks to be bit complicated. However a simple test which could measure the blood concentration/flow of whole blood could have been also of some use.

Benguin

12th June 2004, 06:19 AM

Are you referring to viscosity, kumar?

Kumar

12th June 2004, 08:32 AM

It can be viscosity. It is mentioned: Whole blood viscosity is of limited clinical value and is performed rarely. The viscosity of whole blood is largely determined by the packed cell volume, plasma protein concentration and erythrocyte deformability. In patients with erythrocytosis, the PCV correlates closely with whole blood viscosity and with the clinical manifestations of hyperviscosity.

Increased viscosity may also play a part in the pathogenesis of coronary heart disease, thrombosis, arteriosclerosis, some types of hypertension, diabetes, and even trauma. Increased viscosity is possibly the "final common pathway," through which many diseases produce symptoms, tissue damage, and ultimately death. Here. (http://www.aruplab.com/guides/clt/tests/clt_262c.jsp)