Question

A patient is brought into the emergency room. She is unconscious and is dehydrated. Will she be given an intravenous solution IV that is hypertonic, hypotonic or isotonic to her red blood cells? Explain your answer. Remember that pure distilled water would be hypotonic to blood cells.

Answer 1

Answer:

The correct answer would be - isotonic drips.

Explanation:

As it is known that water is hypotonic to the RBCs of blood and RBCs have no other membrane, like cell wall so due to osmosis the water will get in the cell and will expand it until it gets burst. So, hypotonic drip should not be given to the dehydrated patient.

Hypertonic drip will leads, to the cell water to gets into the bloodstream due to osmosis. It will be the same as consuming seawater which will increase dehydration in this patient.

Thus, the correct answer would be - isotonic.