Hello and welcome to the zero to finals podcast. My name is Tom and in this episode I'm going to be

talking to about anemia. And if you want to follow along with written notes on this topic, you can

follow along at zero to finals.com in the hematology section or in the hematology section of

the zero to finals medicine book. So let's jump straight in.

Anemia is defined as a low level of hemoglobin in the blood, and this is a result of an underlying

disease, and it's not a disease in itself. The prefix an means without, and then the suffix, emir refers to blood.

Hemoglobin is a protein that's found inside red blood cells, and this hemoglobin is responsible for

picking up oxygen in the lungs and transporting it through the blood to the cells of the body,

where it's used. Iron is an essential ingredient in creating the hemoglobin

and it forms part of the structure of the molecule.

When a patient has a low level of hemoglobin, this is called anemia.

You can diagnose a patient with anemia when they have a low hemoglobin

on their full blood counts.

When you find an anemic patient, the next step is to check the mean cell volume.

And this is the average cell volume of the red blood cells, or essentially just the size of the red blood cells.

So first we'll start with giving you some normal ranges. So the normal

range roughly for women, and this is dependent on the individual labs where the hemoglobin is

checked, but for women it's 120 to 165 grams per litre of hemoglobin.

So under 120 would be anemic.

For men, it's 130 to 180 grams per liter,

so a bit higher than women.

Then the mean cell volume is the same for men and women, and this is to 100 femtoleters. Just remember 80 to 100.

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