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Anaemia secondary to critical illness: an unexplained phenomenon.

Astin, R; Puthucheary, Z; (2014) Anaemia secondary to critical illness: an unexplained phenomenon. Extrem Physiol Med , 3 (1) , Article 4. 10.1186/2046-7648-3-4. Green open access

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Abstract

Almost all patients suffering critical illness become anaemic during their time in intensive care. The cause of this anaemia and its management has been a topic of debate in critical care medicine for the last two decades. Packed red cell transfusion has an associated cost and morbidity such that decreasing the number of units transfused would be of great benefit. Our understanding of the aetiology and importance of this anaemia is improving with recent and ongoing work to establish the cause, effect and best treatment options. This review aims to describe the current literature whilst suggesting that the nature of the anaemia should be considered with reference to the time point in critical illness. Finally, we suggest that using haemoglobin concentration as a measure of oxygen-carrying capacity has limitations and that ways of measuring haemoglobin mass should be explored.

Type: Article
Title: Anaemia secondary to critical illness: an unexplained phenomenon.
Location: England
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1186/2046-7648-3-4
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/2046-7648-3-4
Language: English
Additional information: © 2014 Astin and Puthucheary; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Medical Sciences > Div of Medicine
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1424705
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