Nutritional and caloric effects of plasma donation?
What, if any, are the nutritional and caloric effects of the body having to replace plasma which is donated beyond the obvious fluid replacement? A short search indicates that there are lots of proteins, glucose, etc that would be lost with the fluid. How much energy does the body burn replacing that?
Posted Sep 25, 2013, 2:04 AM UTC
121
According to my A&P book your average blood plasma contains 0.80-1.2g of glucose (sugar) per liter. (I'm just going to talk about the "liquid" plasma part and not the red/white cells or platelets.) It also contains 60-80g of proteins per liter, 32-50 of which is albumin (a protein found in many vertebrates which helps regulate osmotic pressure and aids in ion transport.) Much of the remaining protein (5-18g/L) is IgG immunoglobulins although other types of immune molecules and proteins are also present. There are also some fats in your blood in the form of, for example, cholesterol but these are no more then one or two grams/L as fats don't tend to dissolve well in blood.
For potassium you're looking at about 0.1-0.2g/L and for sodium it's 3.2g/L ish. (All of these numbers assume a moderately healthy person on a moderately healthy diet. Your specific results may vary.) There are a tiny amount of other components (like dissolved gas, urea, uric acid, etc.) but this is most of the big stuff.
So your average 500 mL plasma donation costs you about 30-40g (120-160 kilocalories) of protein, half a liter of water and 1.5g of sodium. A glass of water and small bag of potato chips would replace the water, salt and the calories (if not the actual protein) but a normal person wouldn't have difficulty replacing even the protein within a few days.
Also you have about 70 mL of blood per Kg of body weight. (Or you can say 70g/Kg even though the specific gravity of blood is really a bit more then this if you want a quick estimate.) Blood is about 50% to 60% plasma in most people so if you can use these values to calculate the percent of body plasma that you loose per donation if you're interested.