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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Effects of Red Cell Spacing and Red Cell Movement Upon Oxygen Release Under Conditions of Maximally Working Skeletal Muscle

subject

description

The impacts of the particulate nature of blood upon capillary O 2 release have been studied extensively by Federspiel and Sarelius [8] and by Federspiel and Popel [9]. The latter authors found that the O 2 flux out of a capillary decreases rapidly as intracapillary red blood cell spacing increases. The O 2 flux out of a single RBC, however, is enhanced as long as the inter-erythrocytic plasma gap does not exceed the “zone-of-influence” of a single RBC, which they determined to be about 1 capillary diameter. In their model, they considered spherical red cells contained in a cylindrical tube filled with plasma, on the lateral surface of which a boundary Po 2 was specified. Based on earlier studies by Aroesty and Gross [2], they neglected the contribution of intracapillary convection of plasma on O 2 transport. By restricting their view to the capillary interior, they disregarded the interactions between moving RBCs inside the capillary on the one hand and the stationary capillary wall and surrounding tissue on the other. This interaction may be characterized by “charging” and “discharging” of the stationary structures with oxygen as an RBC or a plasma gap, respectively, passes by. The importance of this interaction is being addressed in the present study.