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Anemia in the Critically Ill

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Hematologic Challenges in the Critically Ill

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Abstract

Anemia is one of the most important health-care problems of our time. As an entity per se, anemia is independently associated with significant morbidity and mortality. However, the reasons for anemia are manifold, and as a consequence, the symptom of “anemia” is also the final path of many different diseases. At the intensive care unit, the etiologies for anemia include blood loss due to bleeding, diagnostic blood withdrawal, red blood cell breakdown due to immune hemolytic anemias, or other types of hemoglobinopathies, or limited erythropoiesis due to nutritional deficiencies, or inflammation and inflammation-induced utilization disturbances of iron. Diagnosis of these entities requires adequate knowledge of the underlying pathophysiologies. The most obvious treatment of acute anemia, the transfusion of red blood cells, does not necessarily result in reduced morbidity and mortality, and as a consequence, other means to increase the red cell mass such as the application of iron or exogenous erythropoietin have gained more and more scientific interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Kepler Universitätsklinikum GmBH, Klinik für Anästhesiologie und Intensivmedizin, Linz, Austria

    Jens Meier

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Correspondence to Jens Meier .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anesthesiology, Critical Care and Hyperbaric Medicine, Team Health Research Institute, Englewood, NJ, USA

    Aryeh Shander

  2. Department of Critical Care Medicine, Geisinger Health System, Danville, PA, USA

    Howard L. Corwin

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Meier, J. (2018). Anemia in the Critically Ill. In: Shander, A., Corwin, H. (eds) Hematologic Challenges in the Critically Ill. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93572-0_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93572-0_1

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