Does anyone have a layman's term for Disseminated Intravascular coagulation?!


Question: Yeah, the above is true. It often causes "shock," which is basically a situation in which the heart cannot continue to pump enough blood through the body, and it is often caused by "sepsis," which is contamination of the bloodstream with germs. Those are layman's terms, of course, but DIC itself is a process that doesn't really have a short name, as far as I know.
Edit: I didn't read the above post very carefully. In DIC, the immune system goes haywire trying to kill bacteria, and it ends up triggering clotting inside the blood vessels, where, of course, there should be no clotting. It does this in small vessels throughout the body. It is not trying to fix a bleed, it is clotting (coagulation) inside the blood vessels (intravascular) all over the body (disseminated), in an immune system's overreaction to bacteria (or toxins produced by bacteria). This does use up all of the clotting factors in the blood, and there is a great danger that the person with DIC will, ironically, bleed to death. It is a very grave condition.


Answers: Yeah, the above is true. It often causes "shock," which is basically a situation in which the heart cannot continue to pump enough blood through the body, and it is often caused by "sepsis," which is contamination of the bloodstream with germs. Those are layman's terms, of course, but DIC itself is a process that doesn't really have a short name, as far as I know.
Edit: I didn't read the above post very carefully. In DIC, the immune system goes haywire trying to kill bacteria, and it ends up triggering clotting inside the blood vessels, where, of course, there should be no clotting. It does this in small vessels throughout the body. It is not trying to fix a bleed, it is clotting (coagulation) inside the blood vessels (intravascular) all over the body (disseminated), in an immune system's overreaction to bacteria (or toxins produced by bacteria). This does use up all of the clotting factors in the blood, and there is a great danger that the person with DIC will, ironically, bleed to death. It is a very grave condition.

Basically your blood is trying very hard to stop an internal bleed thus using all of its clotting factors faster than they can be replenished, so then you end up bleeding from everywhere if unable to control it.
RN





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