| dc.description.abstract | Dogs suffering from canine idiopathic immune mediated haemolytic anaemia (cIIMHA) are at great risk of dying particularly in the first two weeks after the diagnosis is made.This high mortality risk may be associated with the development of thromboembolism (TE) and/or disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC) and the resulting organ failure. Piek et al. 2011, postulated that the platelets may contribute to the high intravascular TF expression in cIIMHA, because they found a statistically significant correlation between high TF production on one hand and decreases in both mean platelet volume (MPV) and mean platelet mass (MPM) on the other hand, which suggests platelet activation and therefore possibly TF expression by platelets. Despite the scarce literature about veterinary research on canine platelet associated TF pro-duction, in human studies there has been done a lot of research. Some studies demonstrate that TF protein is bound on the platelet cell membrane , whereas another study claims that activated platelets are also capable to release functionally active TF protein. Moreover, not only activated platelets but also resting platelets are thought to contain TF protein (i.e. α-granules and in the open canicular system). The origin of thrombocyte-associated-TF has been unknown for a long time, but recently a human study has shown that a subset of platelets inherits TF protein form their mother cell: the megakaryocyte. Besides the demonstration of platelet derived TF protein, there is also some evidence that platelets contain TF mRNA or TF pre-mRNA.Both the assumption from the study by Piek et al. 2011 and the evidence obtained from hu-man platelet studies suggests that canine platelets may also contain TF protein and/or TF mRNA. Therefore, the study objectives are 1) to determine whether platelets in cIIMHA indeed contain TFmRNA and 2) if they carry TF protein on their cell membrane. If so, then it may explain the increased risk of developing TE within the first two weeks of the disease. Additionally, we also wanted to prove 3) whether the OptiPrep™ method (30, 31) is a suitable method to obtain highly pure and RNA-containing thrombocyte isolates that are usable for qPCR studies. | |
