Smoking and Blood Changes

Abstract

<h3>To the Editor.—</h3> In his answer to the question, "Cigarette Smoking and Secondary Polycythemia" (224:1654, 1973), Wasserman mentioned some of the mechanisms in which the red blood cell (RBC) mass is increased in smokers. Although he states that an increased RBC mass is due to increased number of RBCs, a study made by our laboratory with the use of electronic counting appears to indicate that the increased RBC mass is mainly due to an increased volume (mean corpuscular volume [MCV]) rather than the number (RBC count) of the erythrocytes. Table 1 shows the results of the study. The study is made on samples from 108 male blood donors aged 20 to 39 years. Blood donors of this group are chosen because the previous studies indicate that the MCV is influenced by the sex and age.^1,2 There are significant differences between smokers and nonsmokers in all parameters of the erythrocyte