Chapter Summary

Congratulations, you’ve made it to the end of the Blood Gases Unit, which is also the final unit! We covered many topics within this unit so let’s take a moment to review and reflect. Think back to the beginning of this chapter, where we covered the fundamentals of breathing. Please put on your pulmonary mechanics and respiration thinking caps to recall the respiratory system’s critical anatomical features and how it functions in changing pressures to allow airflow. Now, once the air is in our lungs, we need a mechanism to transport it throughout the body, which brings us to pulmonary blood flow.  Circulating red blood cells utilize hemoglobin to attach oxygen and carry it to the necessary tissues, allowing for the removal of carbon dioxide. Recall an essential factor in blood flow, resistance, and radius of blood vessels and smooth muscles. Make sure you understand how these structures can be altered in different respiration situations. It is also important to remember that blood flow across the lungs also differs. Moving forward, we touched upon the optimal ratio of air and blood flow known as the ventilation-perfusion ratio. We learned how perfusion causes the different lung zones and how partial pressures enable gasses to flow along their natural concentration gradient. So, we know how the air gets into our lungs and flows through the blood. This leads us to discuss gas exchange and transport within the body. Here is where we got into small details about gas exchange equations at the lung level and the level of the tissue. The oxygen dissociation curve helped us to examine where oxygen is exchanged and the types of conditions that create a dissociation or association environment. In the final chapter, we discussed blood gasses’ control and regulation to tie in whole-body physiology concepts. This chapter explained how the coordinating centre’s integration, various sensors, and effectors enable breathing to be maintained. In concluding that section, we covered the mechanisms of breathing and the importance of blood gases. 

Chapter Review Quiz

Test your knowledge with this question set that includes 25 different questions to review major concepts throughout this unit. Please note these questions are not to serve as a final review but to ensure that big concepts are understood. All details of this unit are not included in this section and therefore, should not be used as a sole study tool.