Word: platelet
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...restore the pathway, the body musters its repair troops, led by the platelets, tiny disc-shaped particles in the blood that help stop bleeding by promoting clotting. These "little plates" produce a chemical, thromboxane, that constricts blood vessels and signals other platelets to gather round. The platelets also manufacture a chemical that induces the artery's exposed underlying muscle cells to multiply. "If the injury is short-lived," says Russell Ross of the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, "the proliferation process is reversible. But if the injury is chronic and repeated in the same sites...
...family members must keep "a sense of the total person" in mind, says Conant. It is easy, but often harmful, to think of a patient only in terms of his illness, Conant believes, saying, "It's important to remember that you are dealing with a person, not just a platelet count." Howe stresses the need for all those involved with a terminally ill patient to show humor and perspective. He believes that his emotional state, as much as his physical state, helped affect his recovery...
...known that cigarette smokers are more susceptible than non-smokers to heart attacks caused by arterial thrombosis, or clotting. A physician at Tufts-New England Medical Center now suggests why. Dr. Peter Levine reports in Circulation, a journal of the American Heart Association, that smoking accelerates the activity of platelets, the blood components that aid in the clotting process by sticking together. Levine bases his finding on an 18-month study of 27 healthy male and female volunteers who had blood samples drawn from their arms every ten minutes during the test periods. Once the subjects' usual clotting rates...
Through the Sidewalk. Also spun out by centrifugation are platelets, the tiny disks involved in clotting. There is still no effective way to prolong their useful life beyond four to six hours, says the center's Dr. Fred H. Allen Jr. So, as soon as they are extracted, the center rushes them to nearby hospitals, notably Manhattan's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where there are always patients whose platelet count has been cut dangerously low by the drugs needed to treat their leukemia. Still other clotting factors, such as those needed by hemophilia victims, are precipitated...
...desperation, the doctors appealed to the public. The response was almost overwhelming: in one week volunteers donated 311 pints. As fast as the blood could be processed, it was transfused into Hubert Harris' veins, while doctors tried to halt the bleeding with blood-clotting platelet concentrates. In all, Harris got 160 transfusions (20 gals.) of whole blood, about 20 times the amount of blood in the average man's body...