Question: what signs do you look for when identifying unhealthy blood cells

Greg Heikel answered on 12 Mar 2020:

So to give this some background, blood cells start as stem cells in the bone marrow where they develop into the cells that are found in the blood. There are three main types of blood cell, the first are red blood cells that carry oxygen in the blood. The second are white blood cells that form the immune system that protects you from bacteria and viruses. The third are called platelets and they help to stop blood flowing when you are cut (a process known as clotting). When we look at the cells in the blood there are a lot of changes in these cells we can look at.

For red blood cells we can look at the size and colour of the cells. If you don’t have enough iron in your body, the red blood cells will be smaller and the red colour will be less intense. If you don’t have enough vitamin B12 the cells will be bigger than normal. There are also diseases that cause your red blood cells to be destroyed, in these cases we will be able to see small fragments of the cells. We can also look for a disease called sickle cell anaemia, caused by a mutation that makes the red blood cells crescent shaped instead of circular.

We can also look for the stem cells. These are usually found in the bone marrow so if we see these in the blood there might be damage to the bone marrow that can be caused by certain types of cancer. If we see a lot of one particular type of stem cell this can indicate that the person has leukaemia, a cancer of the blood cells.

With the platelets we can see if there are too many, which could lead to clots forming that can cause heart attacks or strokes, or too few, which could lead to someone losing too much blood if the are cut. There are also diseases that make the platelets change in size and shape that we can see down a microscope.

These are just a few of the things we can look for, there are loads more but they start to get very complicated!