Blood Test Information – Blood Testing Information

Since about 1993, unexplicably, I began putting on some extra flab. I hadn’t changed my lifestyle or my eating habits, and there was just no rhyme nor reason for it.

Sadly, try as I might, I just could not shed the weight. I tried everything I could think of, to no avail. I ended up putting on about fifty extra pounds.

Then recently I heard a guest of Dr. Jordan Rubin’s on the telly talking about eating according to your blood type. I thought, oh boy, another gimmick.

But shortly after I saw that program I was in our local health food store, and while waiting for a clerk to answer a question, I nonchalantly glanced at some of the books nearby. One caught my eye, because it talked about eating according to your blood type . . . and it wasn’t written by the same fellow I’d heard on television.

So I bought the little book by Dr. Peter J. D’Adamo. It’s called “Food, Beverage and Supplement Lists” for Blood Type O (my type), and was taken from the larger book called “Eat Right for Your Type.”

I readily discovered that some of my “sacred cows” were absolute no-no’s for my blood type. But I was at the point where I would try just about anything to get rid of the excess poundage.

You guessed it! Thirteen pounds dropped off in just a few weeks. And am I ever thrilled! It takes a little discipline, but it’s worth it . . . I just can’t wait to get back to “normal” again.

Pre-Martial blood typing is very important, assuming ofcourse that you are not planning babies
before marriage! In that case, you can go on & read it as Pre-conception blood typing.

There are more than 20 genetically determined blood group systems known today, but the ABO and Rh systems are the most important ones with significant clinical implications in cases of blood transfusion & pregnancy. This is due to the fact that all blood groups are not compatible with each other & mixing of incompatible blood groups may frequently lead to clumping or agglutination of blood cells, which is dangerous & may prove fatal.

Roughly, about 85% people are estimated to be Rh positive. However, if a woman who is Rh negative and a man who is Rh positive conceive a baby, there is a considerable potential for hemolytic disorders to arise as the baby developing inside the Rh-negative mother’s body may have Rh-positive blood, inherited from the father. This is termed as Rh Incompatibility.

In case of first pregnancy, Rh incompatibility usually isn’t a problem because unless there’s some sort of abnormality, the fetus’s blood does not normally enter the mother’s circulatory system during the course of the pregnancy. However, during delivery, the mother’s and baby’s blood can intermingle. If this happens, the mother’s body recognizes the Rh proteins as a foreign substance and can begin producing antibodies against it. These antibodies are introduced into mother’s blood. An Rh-negative pregnant woman can be exposed to the Rh antigens by blood transfusions with Rh-positive blood, miscarriage, or an ectopic pregnancy i.e. from a pregnancy resulting from gestation elsewhere than in the uterus.

Rh antibodies are harmless until the mother’s second or later pregnancies. If she ever again carry’s another Rh-positive child, her Rh antibodies will recognize the Rh antigens on the surface of the baby’s blood cells as foreign, and pass into the baby’s bloodstream and attack those cells. This can lead to swelling and rupture of the baby’s red blood cells leading to reduction in baby’s blood count.

Prevention and Treatment:

Such complications may be prevented by proper pre-martial or importantly, pre-conception blood typing & counseling. By knowing your own & your partner’s blood type, proper preventive measures can be taken to avoid potential medical ramifications. Fortunately, significant medical advances have been made so far to help prevent complications from Rh incompatibility and to treat any newborn affected by such Rh diseases.

The blood type diet is gaining a great deal of popularity. It began in 1996 after the publication of a book that stated the importance of your type of blood in determining nutritional needs. This diet is a balance of several different types of nutrition tips, and advice based on a large amount of research and investigation into how blood type affects your ability to digest certain foods.

This diet begins with finding out the dieter’s blood type. Depending on whether you are A, B, O or AB blood, you will have different nutritional and exercise needs. In order to determine your blood test, you can order a home kit, or have your physician perform the test for you. Your type is determined by two different protein factors housed on the surface of your red blood cells. These factors are the ABO and RH groups.

After you have determined your blood type, there will be several different of areas that you can move into. According to this diet, there are specific dietary requirements that each type of blood should concentrate on. For example, each different type may differ in their ability to digest starches and meats. Each group will also require a different balance of herbs, vitamins, and supplements. There is also information about symptoms, diseases, conditions and medications that are directly related to different types of blood.

When you have determined your blood type, as well as related health conditions, then you can begin to find several resources to help change in your lifestyle. There are several recipes and recommendations on how to realign your diet and food choices. There are also several websites and informational centers that you can use to help begin your diet, or to give support while changing your dietary habits.

Several have called this type of diet a ‘fad diet’ that does not have the requisite scientific testing to back it up. There are also several others that contend blood type does not make a difference, and that there is a balance of nutrients that is required by human beings as a species, and type is not a viable characteristic upon which to make changes. This is important information to consider if you are looking at the differing feedback on this diet.

The blood type diet is a way to determine the nutritional values that you need based on two protein groups found on your red blood cells. These groups, in turn, indicate where your ancestors came from, and what they ate. By determining your blood type, you can then alter your diet so that you focus on the foods that your ancestors evolved with. Before deciding to begin this type of diet, it is important to consider the planned changes in comparison with what is known about overall dietary requirements.

As per the author of book ‘Eat Right for Your Type’ Dr. Peter DÁdamo, there is a relationship between the blood and the foods one eats. According to him, there occurs a chemical reaction between food and blood which is caused by a factor called lectins. These lectins are a class of plant glycoproteins that act like specific antibodies but are not antibodies in that they are not evoked by an antigenic stimulus. They are abundant and diverse proteins found in foods, and have agglutinating properties that can cause various molecules and some cells to stick together.

The idea behind this theory is that blood type O’s are the dominant, hunter-caveman type that require meat in the diet, that type A’s are docile vegetarians, while Type B’s are dairy-eating omnivores. This idea has become a manifesto for many people to rationalize including regular portions of meat and other animal products in their diet. Fortunately, most lectins found in the diet are not quite so life threatening. Ninety-five percent of the lectins one absorbs from typical diets are sloughed off by the body but at least five percent of the lectins one eats are filtered into the bloodstream and reacts differently in different organs, D’Adamos believes.What makes the “blood type” theory a little less convincing is D’Adamo’s postulation that lectin proteins on some foods cause blood agglutination in people of certain blood types who are “not evolutionarily suited” to eat those foods.

However, agglutination is a very serious and potentially life-threatening phenomenon, whereby the red cells in the bloodstream stick together, and forming irreversible clumps. As we all know, red blood cells deliver oxygen to the cells of vital tissues like the brain, heart and kidneys. To accomplish this delivery, red blood cells must flow through capillaries so narrow that they must line up in a single file. If the red cells are being agglutinated by lectins or anything else, clumps of red cells will clog up the capillaries and block the blood flow. Thus, the blood stream will be prevented from delivering its life-sustaining cargo of oxygen to the tissues served by those capillaries.

Since most people are not even aware of their blood types, let alone what foods are “evolutionarily inappropriate” for them to eat, it can be assumed that on most days most people eat the “wrong foods” for their blood type. By the way there are a lot of easy ways to learn your blood type. So, according to D’Adamo’s theory, many people experience repeated showers of agglutinated red cells throughout their bloodstream after almost every meal – day after day! If this is true, then blokes like me, who don’t even know their blood type, are living a medical miracle everyday because if the capillary beds in our organs are subjected to barrage after barrage of agglutinated red cells, they would eventually have clogged up by now, resulting in serious tissue damage with fatal irreparable damage but thanks goodness, we are perfectly alright!

Nevertheless, we all have different nutritional needs, and different people are suited to different types and amounts of food. However, these differences are not significantly determined by the blood type, contrary to what Blood type diet theory says. There has not been any research or scientific evidence in ‘Eat Right for Your Type’ which proves otherwise. The only suggestion for optimal nutrition is to pay attention to what your body tells you, and to focus your diet on fresh, whole foods – grown as organically as possible.

A Combined Wrist Blood Pressure And Blood Glucose Meter is fundamentally a 2-in-1 product that eliminates the need to purchase a Blood Sugar Meter and Blood Pressure Monitor separately. It is most ideal for people with both diabetes (hyperglycemia) and high blood pressure
(hypertension) for home use.

It is typically compact, light-weight, comfortable, designed for ease of use and accurate measurements. Use your wrist to take your blood pressure using the oscillometric BP method with wrist cuff technology. When testing your blood for glucose, it works almost the same like a Blood Sugar Meter except that now you place your blood sample on the same device too. Stores results for both blood glucose and blood pressure tests.

Price Range : Slightly cheaper than you get both devices separately. Around $50 – $56 per unit.

Note : This device does not measure your blood glucose using the wrist function (you need a Wrist-Watch Blood Glucose Meter for this). The wrist function is solely for blood pressure monitoring only. Blood test for this still requires traditional blood sampling and testing with a lancet device.

A Food Monitoring Blood Glucose Meter allows you to manage your blood glucose before and after each meal so that you can be aware of the effects of your food and portion choices, thus make necessary adjustment to continue to enjoy the food you like yet maintaining your body glucose level everyday.

How It Works Actually?

Add a meal flag – You can simply flag your blood glucose results as before or after meal. This will help to remind you of the impact of your food choices. Over time, the meter can also provide you with the meal averages too.

Add a comment – After each test, you can store your result and attach a simple comment to it to note why your glucose level for that test was particularly high or low eg. “Mild Exercise”.

Benefits:

This meter can typically store results and show either the average of all results, the average of all before-meal results, or the average of all after-meal results. It can also show average results for 7 days, 14 days or 30 days.

It will usually include a free diabetes educational material (user manual, DVD and a booklet) to help you manage your diabetes around meals.

About The Site :

My-Blood-Glucose-Meter.com is a Blood Glucose Meter Essential Guide that shares everything you need to know about one.

Many people will have heard of the prostate specific antigen test (or more commonly PSA test) for prostate cancer
, but do you know just what it is and whether or not it is something which you should consider having?

The PSA test was considered a major breakthrough when it was approved for use by the FDA in the mid 1980s and today it remains one of the best tests available for detecting the possible presence of prostate cancer.

PSA testing is quick and easy as it is a simple blood test looking for the presence in the blood of a specific protein produced by the prostate gland. In a normal prostate gland the quantity of this protein produces a level in the blood of about 4 nanograms per milliliter and this is assigned a normal PSA score of 4. As with most things of course this level will vary from one individual to another and so a slightly higher or lower level is not necessarily an indication of a problem and many men will have a normal PSA score of as high as 8 or 9.

In the presence of cancer production of this protein rises and, as the cancer progresses, so the level of the prostate specific protein in the blood increases. Accordingly, once a PSA score reaches 10 your doctor will want to monitor PSA levels carefully as this is an initial indicator of a possible developing problem. If your PSA score continues to rise then additional and more specific tests will normally be recommended. As an indicator, a PSA score of 50 is considered to be very high and the level at which not only is the presence of cancer very likely, but such cancer will probably have already spread beyond the prostate gland itself.

Prostate specific antigens appear in two forms within the blood. In the first form antigens attach themselves to the blood proteins, while in the other the antigens are simply free floating. Today it is possible to test for both by measuring the total amount of PSA in the blood and by measuring only free PSA in the blood. Being able to separate out the two different forms of PSA is thought by many doctors to produce a more accurate test and in a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1995 it was said that the ability to measure free PSA had led to a twenty percent fall in the number of unnecessary follow-up tests following PSA tests.

Perhaps the biggest controversy today is not over whether men should undergo regular (annual) PSA testing which almost all physicians today recommend, but at what age such testing should begin.

Both The American Cancer Society and The American Urological Association recommend testing for all men over the age of 50 and testing for men in ‘at risk’ categories from the age of 40 onwards. There are several ‘at risk’ categories, the most important of which is men with a family history of prostate cancer.

Unfortunately, these recommendations probably have more to do with resources and cost than with anything else and it is not uncommon for men to develop prostate cancer in their forties, or even in their thirties. So, where do we go from here?

Well, this must of course be a personal decision but an increasing number of men are now asking to be tested at quite young ages (typically when they reach 40) to provide a benchmark and then decide on the frequency of follow-up testing depending on their initial result. For example, if a 40 year old man has a normal initial PSA score of 4 then he may decide to leave further testing for 2 or 3 years. However, if his initial test score comes in at 8, he may decide to have a follow-up after six months and, if it remains the same or has fallen, to then have tests annually.

When you start testing and how often you have follow-up testing is very much a personal decision to be taken in consultation with your physician. What is important is that every man should be tested regularly and you should not put off testing for too long.