Assessment of red blood cell deformability in healthy adult subjects: Influence of sex,age,cigarette smoking,menstrual cycle and oral contraceptives

Abstract

To assess the possible influence of age, gender, cigarette smoking, menstrual cycle and oral contraceptives on red blood cell (RBC) deformability, cell transit parameters for one-hundred-ninety-four healthy adult subjects (seventy-nine males and one-hundred-fiveteen females) have been measured by filtration with the Cell Transit Analyser (CTA). The CTA provides the distribution of cell transit times of 5000 red blood cells, the mean transit time <τ> of the RBC population and different percentiles such as p50, p75, p90 and p95. First, correlations between <τ> and mean cell volume (MCV) were calculated for the entire population. Secondly, the influence of sex, age, cigarette smoking, menstrual cycle and oral contraceptives on the RBC mean transit time was evaluated. For RBC with 80 fl < MCV < 98 fl, a very tight correlation between <τ> and MCV was found (r = 0.41; p < 0.001). No effect of age, cigarette smoking and oral contraceptives was found. Nevertheless, influence of sex and menstrual cycle were demonstrated. A significant increase of the CTA parameters measured in the female population with respect to the male population and during menstruation, preovulation and post-ovulation periods was observed. During ovulation, the CTA parameters are comparable to the same parameters in males.