When does your blood know when its the right time to form a clot?
Its supposed to happen only when blood leaves the body. If it happens in the vessels its a pretty bad idea to clot.
My first thought was it must be the contact to oxygen that triggers the clotting process. But thats nonsense since blood tranaports oxygen, right?
So how does your blood “know” its leaving the body?
In: 22
There are 2 clotting pathways, the intrinsic and extrinsic pathways that eventually converge. But the short simple version is this: when there is tissue damage, it releases a chemical signal to recruit platelets and other clotting factors to area where they can eventually form a clot. Your blood in your body is in a constant state of both trying to clot and prevent clots from forming. Things liked deep vein thrombosis and blocked coronaries are examples of that balance going wrong, and things like scabs forming over a wound or microvasculature repair are examples of it going right.
If you want more detail try googling intrinsic clotting cascade, extrinsic clotting cascade and cell based model clotting cascade. There’s a lot that goes into it but there are some simple models/pictures of what’s going on
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