Greetings to all you wonderful readers. 

We are back with our second entry and this time we will be focusing on a very common disease that effects your blood which is anemia. I’m sure most of you people have heard about this disease before right, but what is it actually? 

Have you ever heard of hemoglobin before? It is define as protein structure in the red blood cell. You can break it into 2 separate words which are haem and globin. Haem is the part that carries iron while globin is a protein chain. This is why hemoglobin is call protein structure in red blood cell.

As said in our previous entry, we mentioned that the main function of red blood cell is to carry and transport oxygen throughout our body. However, the oxygen does not scatter around in our blood on its own. The oxygen is carried by this protein structure called hemoglobin. 

So, how does anemia happen? What is the relationship between anemia and hemoglobin? If you are thinking about this, you are on the right track dear readers. Anemia takes place when the level of hemoglobin in your blood drops. Your blood loses capacity to transport oxygen throughout the body as the structure that functions to transport blood decreases in amount. 

The level of hemoglobin in blood for women should be around 12.0-15.5mg while for men the amount should be between 13.5-17.5mg. You are officially an anemic patient when the level of your hemoglobin is below the normal range, but hold on. How are you supposed to know your hemoglobin level? I mean how are you supposed to check your blood?

The solution is very simple. The answer is, just go to clinics or hospital around you and request for a blood test. The doctor will withdraw a small amount of blood and get it tested. If the test is conducted within the hospital or clinic itself, you might get the result within an hour. Quite fast right? 

Since you guys have understood that anemia takes place due to lack of hemoglobin in blood, I bet you are curious right now like how in the world can our hemoglobin decrease? Isn’t it like build in our blood? Should the amount be fix? How can we lose our hemoglobin? 

The answer is, yes it is in our blood and it is an important component of the blood but no the amount is not fixed. There are a lot of reasons on why the amount of hemoglobin can be low thus reducing the oxygen supply in our body as well. Hemoglobin are compose of haem and globin, while haem is the iron component of the hemoglobin. First and foremost, the most common cause of low hemoglobin level is low amount iron. To form haem, you need iron which you can get from the food that you consume every day.  

You need haem to produce hemoglobin right? Without haem you will only get globin which also means you don’t have a complete protein structure to carry oxygen throughout your body. When haem cannot be produced, the amount of hemoglobin will drop. When your hemoglobin drops, you suffer from anemia. This is the common type of anemia and it is called iron deficiency as you have low amount of iron. Other reasons of anemia depends on the type of anemia. 

1) ANEMIA OF CHRONIC DISEASE – This happened due to patient suffering from a chronic disease such as HIV/AIDS, kidney disease or Crohn’s disease. These diseases cause problem in producing normal red blood cell. Low level of red blood cell leads to low level of hemoglobin as hemoglobin is in blood. 

2) SICKLE CELL ANEMIA – This is an inherited disease. In other words, genetic disease. The red blood cell is not in its normal shape. Normal red blood cell is concave shape and it carries oxygen well but in sickle cell anemia, the shape is like crescent and it does not carry oxygen like normal red blood cell does.

3) HEMOLYTIC ANEMIA – This disease occur when red blood cell are destroyed faster than normal rate. It will result in low amount of red blood cell which leads to low hemoglobin and finally anemia.

These are the basically the overview of some of the type of anemia that are commonly in found in people around the world as anemia have 7 types depend on the cause itself. For further and more detail reading about the anemia that we have stated, feel free to click on it.