A man’s blood turned milky white after a dangerous amount of fat built up in his arteries and veins.
The 39-year-old man from Germany—who was not named in the case report published in the Annals of Internal Medicine—went to the emergency room with a range of symptoms.
He complained of nausea, vomiting, headache, and reduced alertness.
The man quickly lost consciousness, according to a report by LiveScience, and doctors at the University Hospital of Cologne fitted him with a breathing tube to keep him alive.
Why Did the Blood Turn ‘Milky’?
Blood tests revealed he had extremely high levels of a type of fat called triglycerides. Normal levels are considered to be anything below 150 milligrams per deciliter. Very high levels are above 500 milligrams. The levels of triglycerides were so high his blood had turned a milky color, LiveScience reports.
Tests later revealed the level of fat—or tryglicerides—in the man’s blood was an astonishing 14,000 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dL).
Doctors diagnosed him with hypertriglyceridemia—a condition of abnormally high levels of fat in the blood.
With the man’s fat levels 28 times higher than acceptable and his condition deteriorating quickly, doctors tried to remove the excess fat from his blood with a technique known as plasmapheresis—that uses a machine.
His blood had so much fat, however, that the machine became clogged.
Why Did Doctors Use ‘Bloodletting’?
Bloodletting is a practice dating back thousands of years that involves withdrawing blood from the body—historically using cuts or leeches—in the belief that this may help treat certain ailments. Over time the practice of bloodletting has been increasingly dismissed or classified as pseudoscience.
When the machine doctors initially used to remove the fat from the man’s blood became inoperable because of clogging, they instead resorted to manually draining the man’s blood in what’s also known as “letting blood.”
The doctors drained some of the patient’s blood and replaced it with a fresh supply of concentrated red blood cells and frozen plasma along with a physiologic saline solution.
The levels of fat in the man’s blood dropped and doctors eventually managed to switch back to the machine to continue with standard treatment protocols.
From The Epoch Times
