Pathology Student

Thalassemia

Next stop along our journey through the hereditary hemolytic anemias is a group of disorders called the thalassemias. Remember when we talked about sickle cell anemia? (more…)

Tumor cell differentiation

Here’s a good question that gets at a concept you should understand: tumor cell differentiation. (more…)

HIT vs. HAT

Here’s a good question about two entities that sound the same (but aren’t).

Q. What is the difference between heparin associated thrombocytopenia (HAT) and heparin induced thrombocytopenia (HIT)? (more…)

Here’s a disorder that’s very similar to hereditary spherocytosis: hereditary elliptocytosis. Patients with this disorder have numerous elliptocytes (as the name says) rather than spherocytes – but many of the features of the two diseases are similar. (more…)

Glucose 6 phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency

Next in our little series on hereditary hemolytic anemias is glucose 6 phosphate dehydrogenase (or G6PD) deficiency. (more…)

Hereditary spherocytosis

Having looked at the causes of hemolytic anemia in a general way (we grouped them into hereditary and acquired groups, and defined the general clinical characteristics of each), let’s take a closer look at the specific kinds of hemolytic anemia. (more…)

Hematology clinical vignette

Here’s a nice boards – type question that requires you to put together some clinical and laboratory data to form a diagnosis, and then describe what the blood smear would look like. (more…)

What kinds of hemolytic anemias are there?

We’ve been talking a lot about hemolytic anemias – we talked about how to figure out if your patient has a hemolytic anemia, and we talked about the DAT as a test that you would do to determine whether your patient’s hemolytic anemia falls into the immune category (warm or cold autoimmune hemolytic anemia) or the non-immune category. (more…)

How do you know if an anemia is hemolytic?

Okay, we’ve talked a lot about the DAT, and how it’s used to determine whether your patient’s hemolytic anemia is due to immune causes (warm or cold autoimmune hemolytic anemia). (more…)

Cold autoimmune hemolytic anemia

We talked recently about the direct antiglobulin test (DAT) which is a test used to find out whether a hemolytic anemia is immune-related or not. And we talked even more recently about the immune hemolytic anemias, starting off with warm autoimmune hemolytic anemia. (more…)