blood pressure

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spagyr
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blood pressure

Unread post by spagyr » Mon Dec 01, 2014 12:59 pm

Forgive me as a relative newcomer but there is a problem with blood pressure that to me is hiding in plain sight. A nominal systolic of 120mm hg, at the upper arm, is apparently responsible for pushing thick treakly blood around 60,000 miles of vessel architecture. I am aware the books say muscle pump and respiration assist, and at capillary level very little pressure is observed, but red cells are quite large and plasma thick and sticky. I ask because said systolic (at the arm) equates to just over 2 and a half psi. There has to be another mechanism.
I'd be interested in your comments.

Zendo
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Re: blood pressure

Unread post by Zendo » Mon Dec 01, 2014 5:07 pm

Physiology is not my strong suit, but remember that blood pressure is a gauge pressure. It's absolute pressure is really atmosphere + pressure from inside the vessel, so about 760 mmHg + 100 mmHg. I guess at a first glance it looks pretty low, but as you can see the pressure difference inside the vessels is about 13% higher than the outside atmospheric pressure, which I guess also means that blood plasma is compressed 13% compared to when it comes out. Blood plasma density is about 1025 kg/m3 which means it's about 2.5% thicker than water.

To me this pressure gradient does not sound too far fetched, but I could be wrong though. Nice question :)

Lloyd
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Re: blood pressure

Unread post by Lloyd » Mon Dec 01, 2014 11:42 pm

This may not help answer the question, but it's related I think. A few years ago I posted some info on this website about David somebody's book about electrical forces in the body. He said blood flows almost frictionlessly because it has a charge and the blood vessels have the same charge. So blood flow is like maglev for high-speed trains.

spagyr
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Re: blood pressure

Unread post by spagyr » Tue Dec 02, 2014 2:44 am

Thanks Zen, a good point. I think there has to be charge involved for the simple reason that small bleeders can do a little squirt, but the blood invariably lands as tiny droplets, frequently on my shirt. A tiny arteriole at the hand has a possible pressure of less than 30mmn hg, about half a psi, but can suirt a few inches; could there be a resonant component backing up the squirt? I see it as an overfilled system with pulse form underlying, my instinct still tells me it doesn't add up. Further to charge Lloyd, does this explain how a 7 micron red cell transits a 5 micron capillary?

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D_Archer
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Re: blood pressure

Unread post by D_Archer » Tue Dec 02, 2014 5:17 am

Gerald Pollack has the answer to this:
When tubes made of hydrophilic materials are immersed in water, the water flows spontaneously through the tube, just like blood through a vessel. External pumping is unnecessary. We wonder whether the light that drives water through those tubes may also help drive blood through our capillaries?
The water is charged by light, that is driving force of movement through the tube. Veins work the same way. So the blood pressure need not be that high to push the blood, the veins themselves do most of the work.

Gerald Pollack@Thunderbolts conference 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnGCMQ8TJ_g

Regards,
Daniel
- Shoot Forth Thunder -

spagyr
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Re: blood pressure

Unread post by spagyr » Tue Dec 02, 2014 4:03 pm

Ahh! That's excellent D-A, I'd only seen his TED talk, your link is very good. Seems we have lipid lining the vessels, lipid lining the blood cells, and various other lipoid constituents in th plasma, each one with it's 4th state water coating, and in the smaller vessels, some protons between each component making it very slippery. I would like to know what makes his tubular flow directional, and must relate to xylem flow in plants. It helps explain the problems with flow down the smaller vessels, but I'm still perplexed with blood pressure itself, I can see a pulse wave with a secnd lesser wave following each pulse due to the elastic rebound of the vessel wall, and I can see this pulse transmitting throughout the vessel trees down to the capillary, but this does not move thousands of red cells along, als there seems to be toast crumbs in my keyboard.

Zendo
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Re: blood pressure

Unread post by Zendo » Wed Dec 03, 2014 5:09 pm

spagyr wrote:Ahh! That's excellent D-A, I'd only seen his TED talk, your link is very good. Seems we have lipid lining the vessels, lipid lining the blood cells, and various other lipoid constituents in th plasma, each one with it's 4th state water coating, and in the smaller vessels, some protons between each component making it very slippery. I would like to know what makes his tubular flow directional, and must relate to xylem flow in plants. It helps explain the problems with flow down the smaller vessels, but I'm still perplexed with blood pressure itself, I can see a pulse wave with a secnd lesser wave following each pulse due to the elastic rebound of the vessel wall, and I can see this pulse transmitting throughout the vessel trees down to the capillary, but this does not move thousands of red cells along, als there seems to be toast crumbs in my keyboard.
Hm. I remember a documentary about how the heart imparts vortexial inertia of the blood as it's pushed into the aorta (like a tornado if you like). Basically our pressure readings could be the reading of the interrupted radial momentum of the blood flow.

I found this article, barely read it cause I'm too sleepy atm. (going to bed), but you can see if it fits the topic area: http://www.rsarchive.org/RelArtic/Marinelli/ - Perhaps contains the "secret" you are looking for :)

Edit: Also, charge is involved (as you alluded to), but perhaps at a different place than what you expect. It's driving the pump (heart) it self.

You maybe know that every cell has ion channels. This effectively means that within the body there is voltage gradients between every lipid layer. This voltage over the lipid layers is what they in medical text keep referring to "action potentials".

Firstly the the voltage gradient is equalized by the inward flow of positive ions into the cell through the ion channels (i.e. a current is induced). Now to keep an oscillation going as the voltage drops, the cell needs stored energy from ATP in the mitochondria to effectively push the ions back out through the cells ion channels into the intercellular space to keep the gradient from dying out. There is in other words a constant flux between the positive and negative side of the lipid layer in a cell. When a muscle cell contracts it takes up calcium ions and expells them again through the costly process of releasing ATP. This electrochemical process is ongoing in all cells of the body and is what keeps us running. So in essence: yes, charge is involved, but charge is involved everywhere and is a constituent of the functioning of larger systems like the heart and the vessels. There is guaranteed a voltage gradient between the inside of the blood vessel lining and the outside, but I don't think this makes much of a difference on the momentum imparted on the flow as it's pumped out of the heart (interesting research subject though :) )

The above is of course hugely simplified. There is like 400 different ion-channels with different functions and all that and ATP does not only push ions around etc.

spagyr
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Re: blood pressure

Unread post by spagyr » Thu Dec 04, 2014 9:27 am

Zendo many thanks that article is simply superb, nicely written too. I'll go off and have a good think. Capillary dynamics and cellular transfer must be very complex, and though I was taught physiology that doesn't mean my teachers were correct, certainly my physiology of heart/circulation dynamics is woeful after reading that. I was intrigued at the mention of possible free gas in the centre of the vortex, which assumes the body is quite happy with this arrangement, with the ease of embolism in diving when there is more dissolved gas in the plasma. Do tell where you find such articles? Or my Googling is as poor as my physiology.

Zendo
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Re: blood pressure

Unread post by Zendo » Sun Dec 07, 2014 3:26 pm

spagyr wrote:Zendo many thanks that article is simply superb, nicely written too. I'll go off and have a good think. Capillary dynamics and cellular transfer must be very complex, and though I was taught physiology that doesn't mean my teachers were correct, certainly my physiology of heart/circulation dynamics is woeful after reading that. I was intrigued at the mention of possible free gas in the centre of the vortex, which assumes the body is quite happy with this arrangement, with the ease of embolism in diving when there is more dissolved gas in the plasma. Do tell where you find such articles? Or my Googling is as poor as my physiology.
I remembered something from the documentary and it was basically about vortex dynamics so I just searched for "vortex dynamics in heart" or something like that in Google. I think I saw this 5-6 years ago so it was your topic which sparked my memory banks :)

There is of course a multitude of mechanisms in capillary dynamics and cellular transfer including the "passive" transfer of water through osmotic pressure (lipid layers being semi-permeable and all), which I didn't mention in the whole ionic transfer spiel; However, muscle contractions and nerve-impulses is clearly driven by small electric interchanges. Although interestingly enough there is an alternative nerve-impulse transmission theory involving solitons rather than electric currents: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soliton_mo ... uroscience

(If interested in a bit of neuroscience here is a comparison between Hodgkin-Huxley and the soliton model):
http://www.adv-radio-sci.net/8/75/2010/ ... 5-2010.pdf


It's intriguing that it is possible to form a sense of unification between biology and physics utilizing plasma physics.

For example that the lipid bi-layer present in cells is kind of a biological analogy to that of the current free double layers (CFDLs) found in plasmas:

Excerpt from https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2011/1 ... chapter-5/:
We have seen that CFDLs form between regions of plasma with different characteristics. As an example, let us consider the effect of a temperature difference (in electron volts, ref. 5.1 above).

This causes an electric field to build up, which will accelerate electrons back to the hotter region. A net flow of electrons to the cold region will continue to build up the electric field until a balance is achieved between the numbers of hotter electrons moving to the cool region and the number of electrons being accelerated back to the hot region by the electric field.

The thin regions near the boundary containing an excess of ions or electrons constitute a Double Layer at the boundary which has an electric field and associated potential drop across it.

The formation of sheaths at boundaries between different plasma regions creates cells of plasma. This cellularization is a defining characteristic of plasma behavior. Gases do not behave in this fashion, which is one reason why it is not possible to apply gas laws to plasmas.
From wikipedias plasma double layer articele:
Bio-physical analogy: A model of plasma double layers has been used to investigate their applicability to understanding ion transport across biological cell membranes.[44] Brazilian researchers have note that "Concepts like charge neutrality, Debye length, and double layer are very useful to explain the electrical properties of a cellular membrane."[45] Plasma physicist Hannes Alfvén also noted that association of double layers with cellular structure,[46] as had Irving Langmuir before him, who coined the name "plasma" after its resemblance to blood cells.

spagyr
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Re: blood pressure

Unread post by spagyr » Mon Dec 08, 2014 10:54 am

Very good links. The double layer type lipid membrane strikes me much like Gerald Pollacks' self organising exclusion zone, the charge being negative at the lipid membrane, with an outer layer of positive charge. As the exclusion zone can extend out quite a few microns, it seems if there is another lipid membrane within the scale, or even a capillary, then you have self organising negative/positive/negative layers across the diameter of the vessel. No wonder the red cell gets kicked if it has negative charge but is stuck in the positive layer. Then I thought the red cell acts as an exclusion zone provider, so beyond its negative layer, blow me..there's a positive one as well: an EU Maglev train. Throw in a blast of kinase to dump the micro electrostatics and just maybe the cells crash and there is your little clot!

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D_Archer
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Re: blood pressure

Unread post by D_Archer » Tue Dec 09, 2014 7:47 am

spagyr wrote:Very good links. The double layer type lipid membrane strikes me much like Gerald Pollacks' self organising exclusion zone, the charge being negative at the lipid membrane, with an outer layer of positive charge. As the exclusion zone can extend out quite a few microns, it seems if there is another lipid membrane within the scale, or even a capillary, then you have self organising negative/positive/negative layers across the diameter of the vessel. No wonder the red cell gets kicked if it has negative charge but is stuck in the positive layer. Then I thought the red cell acts as an exclusion zone provider, so beyond its negative layer, blow me..there's a positive one as well: an EU Maglev train. Throw in a blast of kinase to dump the micro electrostatics and just maybe the cells crash and there is your little clot!
Maybe blood clots can be removed by charging the system in that area, restoring cell/blood function... just a mad idea. (I would use light to charge).

Regards,
Daniel
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spagyr
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Re: blood pressure

Unread post by spagyr » Tue Dec 09, 2014 3:48 pm

...and Professor Pollack did find that aspirin, among others, increased the size of the exclusion zone...

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