What are platelets?
Platelets are essential for normal blood clotting. Platelets are included in Nordic Wellth’s Complete Blood Count (CBC) test.
Why test platelets?
Health check
Discover your risk factors for lifestyle diseases in time to do something about them.
Symptoms
A WBC differential is often part of a routine check when you have diverse symptoms.
Monitoring
Monitor changes to your blood values as you make lifestyle changes or undergo treatments or when taking medication known to affect neutrophil levels.
Symptoms
You have symptoms that haven’t been linked to a particular condition and you want to take a complete blood count.
What do the results mean?
What causes low platelets?
Known as thrombocytopenia, low platelets can be caused by a number of things including certain medications, autoimmune disease, viral infection, heavy metal burden, leukaemia and a number of other conditions. It can be idiopathic, meaning that the cause cannot be identified.
What causes high platelets?
Known as thrombocytosis, high platelets can be caused by autoimmune disease, iron-deficiency anaemia and various other health conditions. High platelet count can also be a sign of atherosclerosis.
More information
Platelets help to stop the bleeding in the case of blood vessel injury and bleeding. Insufficient or inefficient platelets interfere with this process and increase the risk of excessive bleeding.
Values that are slightly outside the reference range can be normal. Reference ranges are not perfect and approximately 5% of healthy individuals may have results outside the reference range.
Instructions
No advance preparation is needed for this test.
On the day of the test
Always take your ID with you when going for a test.
Arrive in good time and sit down quietly for 15 minutes before the test is taken.