Erythrocyte agglutination associated with heparin treatment in three horses.

This is a study about how the use of heparin in horses may cause abnormal clumping of red blood cells, thereby skewing related lab tests but these effects can be mitigated by applying trypsin.

Background and Purpose of the Study

• Erythrocyte agglutination refers to the clumping together of red blood cells (erythrocytes), and this study examines its occurrence in three horses that received a treatment involving heparin, a type of medication used as a blood thinner.
• The research aims to investigate whether this agglutination is genuinely indicative of a condition like hemolysis (destruction of red blood cells) and regenerative anemia (a type of anemia where the body doesn’t produce enough red blood cells to replace the ones that are lost), or if this is an artifact – a false result caused by the treatment rather than reflecting a genuine biological process.

Methodology and Findings

• The study reported that the agglutination of red blood cells was causing artificially low erythrocyte counts and artificially high Mean Corpuscular Volume (MCV) results. MCV is a measure of the average volume of red blood cells; high MCV indicates larger than normal red blood cells, while low MCV indicates smaller than normal red blood cells.
• The researchers treated the cell suspensions with trypsin, an enzyme which breaks down proteins, and found that this eliminated the abnormal clumping in the horses’ erythrocytes. After this, erythrocyte count and MCV results no longer showed the prior abnormalities.

Conclusions

• The paper concludes that erythrocyte agglutination induced by heparin therapy can lead to misinterpretations in diagnostic laboratory tests, essentially yielding false positives for conditions like hemolysis and regenerative anemia.
• The study suggests that if similar conditions are monitored in healthy horses treated with heparin, the results may point to an artificial cause, rather than a genuine biological problem.