Like if you have sickle cell or blood cancer or things can you not just like use a dialysis machine to take out your sick blood and do new clean blood?
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1st, any completely healthy blood wouldn’t be your blood so you would have to deal with rejection, which likely would be even worse than the symptoms of the disease you already have.
And 2nd, even if you find a perfectly compatible donor so that is not an issue you are still talking liters of blood. This would be very time consuming and expensive.
And 3rd, you are still constantly producing new blood so you still have a lot of blood with the underlying issue even a day after you do this procedure.
Technically we can do that
Bone Marrow transplants effective replace your blood by replacing the cells that produce new blood. This is used for severe cases of Leukemia for example.
But the process is risky and requires radiation therapy to kill off your existing bone marrow.
Patients are left with a destroyed immune system and long term problems like being on anti-rejection drugs, and the survival rate is typically only 25-50%
You also need to find a compatible donor which is difficult
This is already kind of what we do. Many people with sickle cell take regular pain meds, and regular blood transfusions.
The problem is, blood cells actually only last 120 days. When you donate blood you’re required to wait at least 8 weeks before donating again so that your blood replenishes, so in people whose blood cell creation has an issue, basically every 8 weeks you’re at square one.
With cancer more commonly the white blood cells are the issue, which are immune system defender cells. with sickle cell, the red blood cells that carry oxygen, nutrients, and wastes, are now sickle shaped instead of discs. This makes them inefficient for their purpose and they get stuck more easily leading to blood clots, meaning they have increased risk of stroke, heart attack, and DVT.
Blood cancer can basically only be solved by a bone marrow transplant. Bone marrow makes blood, so that’s the root cause. We first destroy the recipient’s bone marrow with radiation. And then we keep them in a clean room. No bone marrow means no white blood cells, without those your body can’t fight any kind of infection at all, it’s basically the same fate people with AIDS have, but temporary. Now with someone who has similar enough healthy bone marrow, we take a sample and place it into the recipient’s body. From there the bone marrow will regrow and the problem is solved!
The downside is this only happens 68% of the time if the donor and recipient are related, and 50% or less if they’re not.
So for cancer patients who basically have no other option the risk is many times worth it.
Sickle cell however isn’t necessarily deadly, you have increased risk to deadly events, and you have pain wherever blood flows… which is everywhere, but it’s not deadly so transfusions are the way to go along with supportive medications to reduce pain. They can however also undergo a bone marrow transplants with the same risks and success rates, just it’s solving a different issue
because what it does is it removes waste and extra fluid from your blood before pumping it back into your body, not take out sick blood and stuff
You blood cells are constantly dying and being replaced, it’s not a closed system just recirculating the same blood. When you have a blood disease, that means the blood your body makes is defective. Even if you flushed out all your defective blood and replaced it with a full system worth of good healthy blood, that only serves you for a very short time (like weeks *maybe*) because as the cells in that healthy blood die, *all the blood your body makes to replace it is still going to be defective*. You’re back at square 1 very quickly.
In theory your idea works but the person would need huge and frequent transfusions of perfectly-compatible blood. There just isn’t enough available at this point.
The issue is not your blood per se, but the stuff that makes your blood *cells.* Things like your bone marrow. You can replace bone marrow! We do transplants.
They can do is very dire situations, its called an exchange transfusion. However, it doesn’t treat the underlying cause. An example of when you might do it is when someone with sickle cell anemia needs cardiac surgery, where they might be subject to conditions which would exacerbate their condition and kill them.
Blood cancer isn’t really blood cancer. It’s white blood cell cancer. Most of those cells aren’t in the blood so replacing the blood won’t help. You need to replace your bone marrow or treat it with chemotherapy and radiotherapy until there’s no cancer cells in it.
For sickle cell anemia, blood transfer can help. It’s a treatment you need to repeat though. It doesn’t cure it.
Because the factory that makes it is broken. If you replace their blood, exchange transfusion, that is a short term treatment for severe symptoms. But eventually that blood breaks down and is replaced by their own jacked up blood. A red blood cell lives for about 12 weeks.
Dialysis does not remove blood. Dialysis is for the correction of blood chemistry, removal of waste products, and removal of excess fluid volume. Typically no blood is lost. This is done through a semi-permeable membrane that conserves large sized molecules and passes what is needed to correct blood chemistry etc. If the membrane was permeable to red cells, it would be permeable to pretty much everything and be useless.
I used to do red blood cell exchanges for sickle cell. This is a very rough-shod treatment. Over a series of treatments, when a sickler was in crisis, what would happen was exchanging their blood volume with normal blood. The sickle cell trait is genetic and cannot be fixed. It corrupts how the structures inside the red blood cell on how they microscopically move and function. With exchanges, the percentage of the blood volume with sickled cells was reduced.
Blood cancer – the other responses are correct. Blood cancer is not like tumorous cancer and is far more tricky. Calling it a cancer is kind of a misnomer in how it works.
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