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Old Wed Aug 15, 2012, 08:53 PM
Neil Cuadra Neil Cuadra is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: Los Angeles, California
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Hi Friedbrain.

Yours is such a unique situation so I can understand why it's been hard for the doctors to find answers. As a layperson I'm even less qualified to take a guess, but I can tell you a bit about aplastic anemia.

If your brain fog is due to a lack of oxygen, then you can start at the destination and work back towards the source. If there's a lack of oxygen in the brain, is there a lack of oxygen in the blood? If there's a lack of oxygen in the blood, are there insufficient red cells to carry that oxygen? If there are insufficient red cells, are they being destroyed or are they never in the blood stream in sufficient numbers to begin with? If there are an insufficient number of red blood cells to begin with, are there a sufficient number of immature blood cells in your bone marrow, but they aren't making it into your blood stream, or are there insufficient blood cells in your bone marrow to begin with?

The last condition is aplastic anemia. To determine if you have aplastic anemia a hematologist would do a bone marrow biopsy and look for the tell-tale lack of immature blood cells.

However, that story doesn't exactly fit your description. With a hemoglobin between 12.6 and 13.4 you are in the normal range for a woman, even if your blood counts tend to be on the low side of normal.

High MCV can be due to a number of causes, including bone marrow conditions such as myelofibrosis, but there are other causes unrelated to bone marrow. There's a good summary at MedFriendly. They also have a good summary about MCH, which for you seems to be only slightly elevated.

Have you had your vitamin B12 and folic acid tested? If you haven't, that may be more likely to lead to answers, or rule out possibilities, than looking for aplastic anemia when the symptoms don't quite match. Bone marrow biopsies are very revealing for bone marrow problems, but you don't want to undergo one without strong evidence that there IS a bone marrow problem.

Although diet issues can produce symptoms that affect how you feel, diet isn't going to cause your bone marrow to malfunction.
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