Hemorheologic changes during acute lung injury induced by oleic acid in dogs. I. Hemorheologic changes

The present work reports the hemorheologic changes and its role in the acute lung injury. The blood viscosity, particularly at low shear rate, increased significantly in the early stage of the lung injury and blood viscosity at 100S⁻¹ increased obviously only from 240 min after oleic acid infusion. The analysis of stepwise regression on O2CT and related parameters at different time suggested that the parameters which had the greatest effect on O2CT changes are blood viscosity at low shear rate, hematocrit and erythrocytes aggregation. Thus, we conclude that the hemorheologic changes play an important role in acute lung injury and that it is inappropriate that the increase of pulmonary flow resistance was only attributed to the decrease of microvascular radius.