Christina Rafano explains aplastic anemia, a condition where bone marrow stem cells are damaged, causing low red cells, white cells, and platelets. The guide covers symptoms like fatigue and shortness of breath, plus NCLEX nursing points on infection assessment and prevention.
Let's walk through a study guide for aplastic anemia. So during aplastic anemia, the stem cells inside the bone marrow are damaged and they're not able to keep up with the body's demands of making blood cells. So these include red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets. Now the signs and symptoms that you're going to see in your patients all relate back to that, those lack of blood cells in the body. So lethargy, tiredness, shortness of breath, the patient's just going to be more tired and really unable to, to, to perfuse their body as well perfuse their organs because of the lack of red blood cells. So that's a key critical thinking point to know. Now something the NCLEX loves to test on is infection prevention. So you need to make sure that you are doing infection assessments, watching for infection because the white blood cells are going to be decreased as well as those red blood cells. So in anemia, aplastic anemia, we're also watching for infection, not just anemia with the blood cells.
