Clot retraction

Clot retraction is the "shrinking" of a blood clot over a number of days. In doing so, the edges of the blood vessel wall at the point of injury are slowly brought together again to repair the damage that occurred.

Clot retraction is dependent on the release of multiple coagulation factors from platelets trapped in the fibrin mesh of the clot. Thus, failure to retract can be a sign of thrombocytopenia or a rare condition called thrombasthenia. Blood clot prevention can be of use before this condition develops.

Further reading

• Arthur J. Vander; James H. Sherman; Dorothy S. Luciano (1970). "Clot Retraction". Human Physiology: The Mechanisms of Body Function. McGraw-Hill. p. 502.
• Nikolaos Skubas; George J. Despotis (1999). "Intraoperative Diagnosis and Therapy of Hemostatis Abnormalities with Cardiac Surgery". In Safuh Attar (ed.). Hemostasis in Cardiac. Blackwell Publishing. pp. 118–120. ISBN 9780879934101.
• Oleg V. Kim; Rustem I. Litvinov; Mark S. Alber; John W. Weisel (2017). "Quantitative structural mechanobiology of platelet-driven blood clot contraction". Nat. Commun. 8 (1): 1274. Bibcode:2017NatCo...8.1274K. doi:10.1038/s41467-017-00885-x. PMC 5668372. PMID 29097692.

External links

• Clot+retraction at the U.S. National Library of Medicine Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)