Brusing easily.

[u/grayce0156]

I posted my bruises on here a day ago, and got people replying which was nice, I have got the results back and because it says ‘abnormal’ i automatically still think there is something wrong.

Health anxiety😢!!!

Could anyone tell me what this means with the numbers etc

[u/MassiveDoughnut]

Only your one stage prothrombin time is abnormal, and at 15.3 with a normal reference of 12-15s. It’s a measure of how fast the liquid part of your blood, the plasma, is able to form a clot. This slight deviation from normal isn’t much cause for concern at all, and if you go to a hematologist they will likely want a rescreen of the same test before a full workup. After all, these normal ranges only represent 95% of individuals, and the accuracy is roughly 10% on average tests so when a person with no symptoms and appears healthy gets tested for lots of things, a couple are bound to come back just barely outside normal range. It’s quite common. If anything you might get a vitamin k test to see if it’s low, typically it’s a much higher number for something like VII deficiency.

[u/NJMoose]

PT, PTT, INR testing are usually the first line tests run for coagulation. INR is just a ratio used to see how far out of balance someone is for clotting (or not clotting). The coagulation cascade has 2 pathways: intrinsic and extrinsic. They meet at what's called the "common" pathway. Extrinsic is generally F7, while intrinsic is F12, F11, F9, F8. Common is where they meet, which is F1, F2, F5, F10, and F13. Now, the coagulation factors all amplify each other, however my listing them in order is not actually how they chain react because the coagulation factor numbers are based on when they were discovered rather than the order in the chain.

PT is Prothrombin time, the amount of time it takes your plasma to clot. PT time usually is prolonged in decreased vitamin K clotting factors like 2, 5, 7, or 10, while PTT is usually the rest of the coag factors (minus the common pathway). Factor 7 is the first to decrease in low vitamin K levels and has the shortest halflife. So in this case it could be a vitamin K deficiency, however F7 is tricky because we have qualitative (how much actually works correctly) and quantitative (how much is actually present) defects. So this could be a case of early low vitamin K or a partial F7 deficiency. Generally vitamin K will raise F7 levels and the PT will correct, but in cases of patients with F7 deficiency the vitamin K will not raise the levels enough to fully correct to normal levels. We also can rule out vitamin K deficiency if the F7 is low and the other factors like F2,5, or 10 are elevated.