title: A model of the heterogeneity of red cell hemoglobin concentration.
abstract: A model of red cell hemoglobin concentration has been developed and computer stimulations performed to investigate quantitatively the relationship among the intraindividual heterogeneities of cell hemoglobin content, volume, and hemoglobin concentration. In the model, the cell volume and hemoglobin content frequency distributions and their joint distributions are described by Gaussian probability distributions. The frequency distributions of cell hemoglobin concentration are determined from the joint probability distributions by summing the joint probabilities of the variate pairs the ratios of which equal the specified concentration. For the parameter values considered, the mean cell hemoglobin concentration closely approximates the average (i.e., statistical mean) concentration. The heterogeneity of cell hemoglobin concentration increases with increasing coefficients of variation of cell hemoglobin content and cell volume and with decreasing correlation coefficients. When the correlation coefficient is greater than 0.7, cell hemoglobin concentration shows less relative dispersion than the component indices.
mesh_terms: D004909:Erythrocyte Indices; D004911:Erythrocyte Volume; D004912:Erythrocytes / Q000032:analysis*; D006454:Hemoglobins / Q000032:analysis*; D008954:Models, Biological; D013223:Statistics as Topic
chemical_list: D006454:Hemoglobins