What is hemophilia?
Hemophilia is also known as bleeding disorder. Hemophilia is caused by an inherited defect in a pair of chromosomes. It derives from two Greek words: heamo, meaning blood, and philia, meaning affection. A person may get affected by hemophilia when he or she inherits problems with certain blood-clotting factors. The defect for hemophilia depends on the capacity of the person that how much clotting factor he can produce. Hemophilia occurs in 2 forms, hemophilia A and B. In both forms, a factor gets defected. The defective factor interferees with the ability of the body to produce the clotting factors that allow for normal clotting.
Symptoms to know that you are affected by hemophilia
Injuries and bleeding are some of the common symptoms of hemophilia. But there are some other symptoms that are:
- Spontaneous bleeding after an injury
- Bleeding in urine and stool
- Prolonged bleeding after the umbilical cord is cut at birth
- Bleeding into joints and associated pain and swelling
- Bleeding in muscle
- Bleeding after dental work
Treatment for Hemophilia
Now days for many hemophilia treatment options are available.The common treatment for hemophilia is replacing the clotting factor that is too low or missing. We use two clotting factors in replacement therapy which comes from two sources: one clotting factor products are derived from human blood plasma. Clotting factors from human blood plasma have a little chance of being polluted with viruses such as HIV and hepatitis; therefore we use the other recombinant DNA technique. This process is carried out in aseptic production facilities where the clotting factor factors are grown synthetically.