 Welcome to nursing school explain in this video on the grading of edema if you haven't already done so Please check out my video where I actually demonstrate how to appropriately assess for lower extremity edema Now first of all, why do we assess for edema? so that edema basically just means swelling and we have to distinguish with whether it is pitting or non-pitting and pitting meaning that when we press down on the skin and We let go that an indentation is left and that is pitting edema Now that usually means that there is fluid that is underneath the skin that has seeped out of the Intravascular space and is now sitting in an interstitial space for whatever reason now reasons could be hard issues such as heart failure liver disease Maybe some injury maybe some lymph edema so there are a variety of reasons But it's not our job to determine why this is going on It's just to help for clinical tools to see what's going on with the patient and when the edema is pitting Meaning that there is this indentation left then we're we're have a certain scale and we're gonna Describe the edema based on that scale so it goes from plus one to plus four and Plus one means that the indentation that we leave with our fingers is two millimeters But it resolves pretty quickly or immediately If there is a plus two edema then that indentation that we create is three to four millimeters in diameter And it would takes a few seconds to resolve a plus three five to six millimeters So a pretty significant amount and takes about ten to twenty seconds to go away And they plus four pitting edema is greater than six millimeters and takes more than twenty seconds to go away And six millimeters is a little more than a half centimeter So if you can see your whole fingerprint there and it doesn't go away that typically means that it's a plus four So a very helpful or important clinical tool to for us to know and then this is how you would chart it Plus one pitting edema to bilateral or extremities Extending to mid shin for example So keep that in mind when you assess your patient for edema pitting versus non pitting and the grading scale Thanks for watching. See you soon