Monday, July 20, 2009

A Neutrophil Primer

Those crazy but critical neutrophils. You gotta love 'em.

Neutrophils are needed to fight off infection.

Neutrophils (stained purple in the image above), are the most abundant type of white blood cells in our bodies. Normally, about 100,000,000,000 -- one hundred billion -- are produced by normal bone marrow each day.

Gil's bone marrow was producing immature neutrophils when he was diagnosed with AML. After his first round of chemotherapy, his bone marrow was not producing any neutrophils. Now we are waiting for the bone marrow to produce normal, mature neutrophils.

Neutrophils are short lived. They have a half-life of four to ten hours when not activated and immediate death upon ingesting a pathogen. 

The normal range for neutrophils is 2.5 - 7.5 (x 1 million) per liter of blood.

Gil's neutrophil count made it to 0.6 today.

Up from 0.3 yesterday. 

Trending in the right direction, to be sure.


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