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A friend and I are puzzled.  Chemistry question, maybe?  Can you have too much salt in your system and still show low chloride levels in a blood workup?  Friend's doctor told her "chloride is not the same as salt".  Well, true up to a point.  But she is told she is using too much salt and to cut back.  Then her blood workup shows low chloride?

 

Is this possible?  Thank you.

Posted
  On 2/17/2018 at 3:41 PM, hazelm said:

A friend and I are puzzled.  Chemistry question, maybe?  Can you have too much salt in your system and still show low chloride levels in a blood workup?  Friend's doctor told her "chloride is not the same as salt".  Well, true up to a point.  But she is told she is using too much salt and to cut back.  Then her blood workup shows low chloride?

 

Is this possible?  Thank you.

This is a medical question, not just a chemistry question, because the balance of ions in body fluids is a complex system involving many components, and competing mechanisms of compensation.  In a way, this is a long-winded way for me to say I don't know the answer. :)

However I am aware that there are several cations in the blood, notably Na+ (sodium) and  K+ (potassium), and at least two important anions, Cl- (chloride) and HCO3- (bicarbonate). Obviously your blood has to be electrically neutral, so it is conceivable that if you have too much dissolved carbon dioxide in your blood, say, you will have excess HCO3- and correspondingly less Cl- to balance the Na+ and K+ that are present. 

 

Ordinarily I would think that more salt, would raise both Na+ and Cl-, but I can imagine circumstances such as the above in which raised Na+ might involve raised HCO3-, and that possibly Cl- might not be raised as much as expected. I see from Wiki that this indeed occurs in people who are not expelling enough CO2 from their blood for some reason: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respiratory_acidosis 

 

But the short answer is to have chat with the doctor, I think, unless we have anyone on the forum who knows the ins and outs of this subject. 

Posted

Thanks and I suspect you have answered it as a "could be sometimes".  Yes, I debated putting it in biology but decided chemists know how combined elements work.  Anyway, just wanted our curiosity satisfied  chemical elements can work differently when combined than how each works separately.  I appreciate your answer and thanks for the link.  I'll read that asap.

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