What is the half-life of the red blood cell in rat?

Dear knowbusiness,

Thank you for your question.  The short answer to your question is 14
days.  This is documented in the following article:

Ganzoni, A. M., Oakes, R. & Hillman, R. S. (1971) Red cell aging in
vivo. J. Clin. Investig. 50:1373-1378.
http://www.nutrition.org.ezproxy.umassmed.edu/cgi/external_ref?access_num=5090053&link_type=MED

The free full text of this article can be downloaded from the above link.

This article (and the above half-life) is re-quoted in this article:
Reeves PG. Demars LC. Johnson WT. Lukaski HC. Dietary copper
deficiency reduces iron absorption and duodenal enterocyte hephaestin
protein in male and female rats. [Journal Article] Journal of
Nutrition. 135(1):92-8, 2005 Jan.



"In the same experiment, signs of anemia were not observed until
between d 7 and 14, which is reasonable, because the half-life of rat
erythrocytes is 14 d (31)."

One should bear in mind that there may be some species variation
depending on exactly which type of rats are involved.  The ones in the
above paper were Osborn-Mendel and Simonson Albino rats.

I hope this information was useful.

        -welte-ga

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Request for Answer Clarification by knowbusiness-ga on 22 Mar 2005 13:25 PST

The free full text of the article from which my answer is drawn is not
accessible by me. It requires a login to the University system of
which my answerer, welte-ga, is a member. Weste-ga is not presented
with a login screen when he searches. I am, however.

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Request for Answer Clarification by knowbusiness-ga on 22 Mar 2005 13:26 PST

Welte-ga: What is the search string you used to find the half-life of RBC in rat?

Thank you.

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Clarification of Answer by welte-ga on 22 Mar 2005 17:44 PST

My apologies for the bad link.  I forgot to paste in the link to the
free version of the article.  Here is the link to the article in the
Journal of Nutrition:
http://www.nutrition.org/cgi/content/full/135/1/92

Here is a link to the free full text article that is quoted in the
above article from the Journal of Clinical Investigation:
http://www.pubmedcentral.com/picrender.fcgi?artid=292074&blobtype=pdf

Believe it or not, they actually have online free full text articles
all the way back to 1924!

Best,

  -welte-ga

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Request for Answer Clarification by knowbusiness-ga on 23 Mar 2005 14:29 PST

What is the search string you used which yielded these two results? Thank you.

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Clarification of Answer by welte-ga on 24 Mar 2005 05:36 PST

The search string I used (on the Ovid database initially) was:
erythrocyte rat
erythrocyte rat half-life

This turned up the articles I cited in my answer, which I then found
on PubMed, which is freely accessible, but at times harder to search
than the Ovid (subscription) version.

         -welte-ga