Abstract
The existence of changes in blood viscosity and filterability in some diseases supported several methods to wash red cells, hypothesizing that these modifications could be due mainly to red cells. In order to investigate these changes, washed red cells were studied in several diseases. Washed red cells were suspended to 10% haematocrit and filtered through Nucleopore filters 5 micron diameter; this study was meda in healthy subjects and in patients suffering from peripheral obliterative arterial disease, stroke, myocardial infarction and cancers; the same parameter was studied also in arterial and venous blood. The analysis of these data did not show very significant differences between the healthy donors and each group of patients studied.
On the basis of these results we could suppose that the various diseases really did not induce any change of the erythrocyte deformability and that the changes we see in whole blood filterability depends on other blood cells or components.
On the contrary we can hypothesize that the washing technique by itself provokes a damage of the erythrocyte membrane; this damage may be so great as to inable us to detect a significant difference among the groups studied.
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