Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Glossary

FVC: This stands for Forced Vital Capacity. It measures the amount of air you can blow out in total from your lungs. Today (30.5.07) mine stood at 2.23 which is approximately 60% of predicted for my height and age I reckon.
FEV1: This stands for Forced Expiratory Volume, the one representing one second. It measures how much of your FVC you blow out in the first second, therefore indicating how strong/elastic your lungs are. Mine is currently about 1.81 which again is about 60%. The FEV1 is always lower than the FVC.
Sats: This is shorthand for oxygen saturations. The average healthy persons sats will hover between 98-100% although anything above 95% is fairly normal. Below 95% indicates problems. If sats drop below 90% it is customary for oxygen to be used. Sats should not be dropping below 85% if possible.
WBC: This stands for white blood cells. This count is measured on routine blood tests to keep an eye on potential infection. Normal WBC count is anything below 10.
CRP: This stands for C-reactive protein. CRPs are another blood test result, these are inflammatory markers, again raised levels are a sign of infection. Normal is below 5. Mine may or may not have climaxed at 500 before. (oops).
BP: Blood pressure.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks Em! :)

Well done on the training front! For the record, you seem to bencapable of spending longer on the machines than I could...something I'm afraid to say I can only blame on sheer laziness, and an inherited lack of the "sporty" gene (which I'm sure does exist)...!
xxx

Anonymous said...

be capable*

Anonymous said...

i used to work in a microbiology office, reporting the results of lab tests. we considered a CRP of over 10 to be a sign of infection, so I reckon that means 5-10 is okay too.