This blood donation calculator will tell you how much total blood you have according to your height, weight gender but also the next recommended donation date. You can discover more on the Nadler formula and about donating blood below the form.
How does this blood donation calculator work?
This is a great health tool that you can use whether you want to check how much blood you really have in your body or when you are interested to know about your donation schedule. There are two areas in the calculator and you can use either one of them or both at the same time.
The first area in the blood donation calculator will ask you for your gender, weight and height in order to retrieve the total blood volume. For your convenience, you can input the last two measurements in either Metric or English units. If you complete the designated fields and press calculate you will receive the amount of liters of blood you probably have in your body.
The second area is designed to make it easier for you to keep track of the date when you can donate blood again. All you need to do is input the latest donation date and your gender in order to receive the next due date but also to have displayed a countdown to that date.
The Nadler method
This is a classic formula employed to calculate the amount of blood in the human body and takes account of gender, height and weight as variables. Here are the two versions to be used:
For Male = 0.3669 * Height in M3 + 0.03219 * Weight in kgs + 0.6041
For Female = 0.3561 * Height in M3 + 0.03308 * Weight in kgs + 0.1833
This is a method that applies for adults and children that are over the weight of 35kg. Men, on average, have 4.5- 6 quarts of blood while women have 3.5- 4 quarts.
Example of a calculation
Let’s take the case of a female weighing 124 lbs at a height of 67 inches. First of all these units need to be transformed in the metric system. Therefore she weighs 56.2455 kg at a height of 1.7018 m. The result using the Nadler formula is 3.84 liters.
For the second area, if we consider she donated blood on March 1st 2015 she will be able to do so again on June 21st 2015.
Donating blood recommendations
1. What you need to know is that most people that are in a good general health can give blood. The age condition varies between 17 and 65 but there are still weight criteria to be met (having at least 50kg/110.2lbs.
2. Do you know how much blood you actually donate? It is up to 500ml, just under a pint.
3. There are either whole blood donations or just plasmapheresis where only plasma is used.
4. In terms of how frequently you can give blood, there is a limit set to approximately 12 weeks for men and 16 weeks for women, an interval necessary for the body to bounce back, the fluid to be replenished and to reduce any risk of iron deficiency.
References
1) S. Karger AG. (1999) AABB Blood Bank Operations Manual: Complete Manual with 'Standards Blood Banks and Transfusion Services' American Association Of Blood Banks
2) Williams PW, Gray, H. (1989) Gray's anatomy (37th ed.) New York: C. Livingstone
21 Mar, 2015