What Are Platelets?
What are platelets?
A specific type of cell found in your blood that helps form blood clots to stop bleeding.
How Do They Accomplish This?
When a blood vessel breaks, platelets gather in that area and help seal off the leak by forming what is known as a platelet plug.
Sometimes, if the wound is small enough, the platelet plug is enough to stop the blood from leaking. However, if the wound is too large, specific cells called clotting factors are also recruited to the site of injury to aid in stopping the leakage of blood.
Thus, these platelets and clotting factors stick together to form a clump and essentially plug up the hole to stop further bleeding.
What’s A Normal Range?
They can vary slightly between the labs and hospitals that test them, but in general the "normal" range is
150,000 to 450,000
If your platelet number is too LOW it's called thrombocytopenia, and conversely if this number is too HIGH it's called thrombocytosis OR thrombocythemia depending on the cause.
Again, anything outside of these ranges both LOW and HIGH can clue your clinician in on some disorder that may be occurring in your body.
