Latest Red blood cell Stories
By Waldron, Clarence Versatile actor Larenz Tate says he has played a lot of roles in his long career, but nothing compares to what he's doing right now. He is continuing in role as national spokesman for sickle cell disease awareness in the "Be Sickle Smart: Ask About Iron" campaign, "As an actor, I believe that my greatest roles are ones that inspire and uplift," he explains. "I am therefore wholly committed to my latest role in the "Be Sickle Smart: Ask About Iron" campaign. It is a role...
By Anne Harding NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - The amount of time a tourniquet is left on an athlete's arm during blood drawing can influence hemoglobin and hematocrit levels, both of which are used to screen for blood doping. The hematocrit is the percentage of whole blood that is made up of red blood cells. A value of 42% to 52% in men and 35% to 47% in women is usually considered normal. The normal amount of hemoglobin -- the oxygen-carrying component of blood -- ranges from 13 to 18...
(RedOrbit) Research funded by the National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI) has developed a cell phone-sized blood-count machine requiring less blood than a mosquito bite that will make blood tests easier for many patients.The scientists come from California Institute of Technology, the University of California, Los Angeles, and IRIS International, Inc.Dr. Yu-Chong Tai, an investigator on NSBRI's Technology Development Team says, "analysis of blood composition is how doctors...
By Nelson Graves TURIN (Reuters) - They call it blood on feet. You are an Olympic athlete. You bring a friend to the Games. The friend donates blood. You inject it, it increases your oxygen-rich red blood cells and you perform better. A simple procedure that requires no drugs -- but which is banned under world sports rules and which can be deadly. The discovery of needles and a blood transfusion kit in the Austrian biathlon and cross-country team bases last weekend has trained a...
LONDON (Reuters) - The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) has rejected Olympic time trial gold medallist Tyler Hamilton's appeal against a two-year ban for testing positive for a blood transfusion. "CAS has confirmed the reliability of the blood transfusion test applied to Hamilton during the Tour of Spain (in September 2004)," the court said in a statement on Saturday. The American cyclist had been under a cloud of doping suspicion since the 2004 Athens Olympics where he tested...
TURIN (Reuters) - Eight cross-country skiers including an Olympic gold medallist have been suspended for five days after tests showed they had an abnormally high red blood cell count on the day the Turin Winter Olympics open. The International Ski Federation (FIS) said on Friday that among the athletes was German Evi Sachinbacher Stehle, 25, who was a gold medallist in the women's relay in Salt Lake City and also won a silver in the women's sprint at the same Games. Sean Crooks...
TURIN (Reuters) - Eight Nordic skiers at the Winter Olympics have been suspended for five days after tests showed they had an abnormally high red blood cell count, the International Ski Federation (FIS) said on Friday. Sean Crooks (Canada), Sergey Dalidovich (Belarus), Jean Marc Gaillard (France), Alexsandr Latzukin (Belarus), Natalia Matveeva (Russia), Kikkan Randall (U.S.), Evi Sachenbacher (Germany) and Leif Zimmermann (U.S.) were shown to have abnormally high hemoglobin values,...
By Gene Emery BOSTON (Reuters) - Some patients with severe sickle cell disease may need a lifetime of blood transfusions to reduce the chances of suffering a stroke, data from a new study show. Scientists had hoped that patients with blood disease could be treated with a limited number of transfusions. But the study, published in this week's New England Journal of Medicine, found that the stroke risk reappeared after blood exchanges were stopped. "We hoped that maybe we were dealing...
Inhaling a small dose of nitric oxide gas may one day help sickle cell patients avoid pain crises and live healthier lives, researchers say.Nitric oxide may help normalize a sickle cell patient's hemoglobin by restoring the natural charge and shape to the oxygen-carrying component of red blood cells, Medical College of Georgia researchers have found."Hemoglobin S plus nitric oxide behaves much like normal adult hemoglobin, which does not sickle," says Dr. C. Alvin Head, chair of the Medical...
By specially tagging the outer and inner membranes of red blood cells infected with the malaria parasite and tracking the cellular changes that precede the cell bursting event that disperses parasites to other blood cells, a group of researchers has deepened our understanding of how the malaria pathogen destroys the cells in which it resides. The work is reported in Current Biology by Joshua Zimmerberg and colleagues at the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Malaria devastates humanity:...
