Human Red Blood Cell Properties and Sedimentation Rate: a Biomechanical Study

Abstract

Human blood is widely used for clinical diagnostics due to its easy accessibility and high sensitivity for any metabolic disorders and diseases. In that way, blood is the most proper tissue for easy and detailed diagnosis of the body metabolism and state of its organs and tissues. Here a brief review on electric and mechanical properties of red blood cells (RBC) that can be useful for clinical diagnostics is presented. Those properties are responsible for differences in the RBC aggregation and sedimentation (erythrocyte sedimentation rate test, ESR) in healthy humans and patients with different acute and chronic diseases. The physical forces between RBC suspended in the blood plasma (BP), discrete and continual models of blood are presented.