All About the Blood Groups
Hello everyone!
I am starting a series through which I want you to get aware of some general medical concepts, in a really simple and interesting way, which everyone should know.
For the first part, I will take up the topic of ‘Blood Groups’. Now, most of you know that we all have a particular blood group. You must have heard people or doctors saying- “Your blood group is B+ or My blood group is AB-”.
But what does this exactly mean? To understand this, let’s first forget about positive(+) and negative(-) and classify the blood of all humans in 4 categories- A, B, AB and O.
You can have only one of the above blood groups. Knowing the blood group of a person is a must during the transfusion of blood. Or in simple, during the donation of blood. If a person suffers severe blood loss, doctors give the patient blood of another human which he donated. But, the doctor can’t give the patient any blood.
Here comes the problem of the compatibility of the blood of different humans. We aren’t sure that person x’s blood is compatible with person y’s blood. To check it, we match the blood group before donating. The table below will help you understand it the best:-
Blood groups under the ‘compatible with’ category are the ones that can be received by the patient or recipient. People with blood group AB are the universal recipients which means they can take blood from any group whereas people with blood group O are the universal donors which means they can donate to anyone.
Note- Mismatching of blood groups while transfusion can cause serious problems including the destruction of red blood cells.
Till now, I hope you understood about 4 categories (A, B, AB and O) of blood. But there is one more parameter on which our blood is categorized. It’s on the basis of positive(+) and negative(-) or in advance terms- Rh positive (Rh+ve) and Rh negative (Rh-ve).
First, observe the image below and tell what it looks like?
We all know about red blood cells and how it looks on microscopic levels. But, everyone doesn’t have such smooth disc-shaped RBCs. Some people have a protein attached to the surface of their cells. If your RBCs have this protein, you are Rh+ve but if your cells lack these proteins, you are Rh-ve.
These green spikes are the proteins that Rh+ve people have. So, before donating or receiving blood, doctors consider this factor too. The table below explains how it works:-
Based on Rh+ve and Rh-ve, people with blood group AB+ are called the universal recipients and people with blood group O- are called the universal donors.
To know about the topic in a more advanced way, I will recommend you to read pages- 280 and 281 of the chapter- 18 of the book given below.
Thanks for reading :)
