Effect of white blood cells on red cell filterability

Abstract

A macroscopic theory of the flow of a suspension of red and white blood cells through a nuclepore filter is given on the basis of the relative resistance β, which is the ratio of the resistance offered by a cell in flowing through a pore to the resistance of flow of the suspending fluid only. In previous theories, the resistance β of each cellular species was considered to be a constant. The theory has been expanded to include the possibility of a distribution of the β values for each cellular species. Normal distributions are used with a mean several times its standard deviation. Cells which plug pores are represented in this theory by high values of β. lf a typical red blood cell has a β value of 5 and takes of the order of 10 milliseconds to traverse a pore, then a white blood cell with a resistance factor β of 1,000 will take approximately 2 seconds to traverse the filter.