Bleeding Time & Bleeding

The bleeding time is currently the only clinically available comprehensive test to explore primary hemostasis. It is currently performed mostly as a screening procedure before surgery, to detect otherwise unknown defects in plateletvessel wall interactions, but its use in this specific setting has been seriously questioned by recent reanalyses of previously published literature. We studied the relationship of the bleeding time from a standardized cutaneous incision with other parameters of bleeding derived from the analysis of the bleeding time curve and prospectively investigated possible correlations of these alternative parameters, as well as of the bleeding time, with a number of indices of actual bleeding during or after coronary bypass surgery. Four parameters (bleeding time, total bleeding, peak bleeding rate, and time to peak bleeding) were derived from the analysis of bleeding time curves measuring blood losses from a standardized cutaneous incision at 30-second intervals in 118 subjects. Parameters from the bleeding time curve were subsequently obtained in duplicate as a preoperative assessment...