 What comes in our sink school explain in this video on causes of anemia? So I've always broken this down into erythropoiesis. This is another video that I have where it goes into what it takes to produce red blood cells. This is just another video that kind of breaks it down to the type of what happens to the red blood cells. Why are we anemic or why is the patient anemic what causes that reduction in the red blood cells? So basically we have three categories here. We can have either decreased red blood cell production. We can have loss of RBCs or we can have destruction. So for some reason for one of those three reasons there is not enough red blood cells in the circulatory volume evidenced by low red cell count as well as low hemoglobin and hematocrit. So for low RBC production in my other video where I talk about erythropoiesis which an erythropoietin is a hormone that's required for red blood cell production. So if we have low levels of erythropoietin then we're not going to be able to produce these red blood cells. Also we have certain nutrients, minerals and vitamins that are needed for red blood cell production. Most common is iron. So iron deficiency causes anemia. And then also vitamins B12 as well as folate are required to produce RBCs and if we don't have that we're going to be anemic. And then thirdly here we have iron availability. So we already talked about iron in the nutritional deficiencies here but if the iron is not available to be used on that hemoglobin if it cannot bind to the hemoglobin then that's a different problem than we might have enough iron available but we just can't transport it to the tissues and that's another problem of the production here. Now over here we have loss of red blood cells. So for some reason we are just losing them and that's due to blood loss and that can be acute or chronic. So acute think trauma or you cut yourself in into an artery and you acutely lose a lot of blood which is going to cause acute blood loss anemia. But blood loss can also be chronic. So think about your GI bleed. So somebody who has maybe a small tumor or polybin in their colon they're not really aware of it. It doesn't really show signs and symptoms of black tarry stools or bright red blood. They might not know and they have this chronic slow leak of bleeding in their GI tract and then it can be a blood loss anemia but in this time in this case it would be chronic. And then liver disease also can lead to chronic loss of blood cells of red blood cells. And then over here in the third category we have destruction of red blood cells. So now we're producing enough we're not losing them but for some reason the body is destroying or something is destroying these red blood cells and then the count is going to be low. So that can be caused by sickle cell disease which is a hereditary blood disorder and then certain medications can cause destruction of RBCs. So make sure that you always read the side effect profile of any medication that you're administering to your patient or even taking yourself. And medications here are just as simple as antibiotics the class in itself. So certain antibiotics can cause hemolytic anemia as well as anti-inflammatory drugs and then anti-neoplastics or cancer drugs. So always make sure that you're well aware of any reactions the patient has had in the past and that you also read the side effect profile. And then blood transfusion in compatibility so if we give a patient who is a positive a B positive blood that is going to be incompatible with their regular blood type and that's going to lead to destruction of red blood cells and make the patient anemic because they are being destroyed and then also trauma. So not only can we lose blood acutely here in this category of blood loss anemia but also for trauma. So think about a maybe a severe pelvis or a femur fracture where there's a lot of hematoma that occurs in that region and that bone marrow is leaking through the bone which causes a lot of big hematoma and then these blood cells from just a sheer force of that trauma they just got destroyed on impact. So that's another cause of destruction of RBCs. Thanks for watching this video. Also check out my other video about erythropoiesis to see find out what it takes to actually build these red blood cells in our body and then the separate videos about the different types of anemia where I go on more into treatment and science and symptoms. Thanks for watching Nursing School Explained. See you soon.