What would you expect to see in a blood sample of a person who has drowned in salt water?

Answer 1

Besides an absolutely normal pathology, you would expect all body fluids to be more concentrated. This is because the osmotic difference between the surrounding water, and that in the body would cause wate to LEAVE the body. This CAN happen via the skin, even thought the skin is fairly (but not entirely) waterproof.

Remember that the process of osmosis causes fluids to follow the solute concentration, so a hypertonic solution such as very salty (sea) water would attract fluid, whereas hypotonic solutions (those devoid of solute) would effectively repel water.

Bottom line is water would be attracted out of the body tissues and blood into the surrounding sea water.

NOTE THAT SURFGIRLTOGO's ANSWER ABOVE IS NOT CORRECT. If the salt was INSIDE the red blood cells, the osmotic pressure differential would cause them to lyse and burst. But as the salt water is OUTSIDE THE BODY, the water would be attracted OUT of the RBC's (and all other 9 types of cells in the blood) causing them to shrivel instead.

Answer 2

If you just want an answer based on appearance, the answer would be nothing. There would be no difference between 'normal' blood and blood derived from a drowned person. In other words, both blood would look red.

If you're interested at a cellular level, probably no big effects would be seen either. Probably the probable thing that can occur is that those red blood cells found in the capillaried around the alveoli would have shrunken up (due to loss of water by osmosis), and the blood would be more concentrated. BUT, it would be more concentrated due to the loss of water and not due to the entry of sodium ions (plus others) from the lungs.

Water trough the skin cannot be lost (as can occur through the lungs) since skin is impermeable to water (waterproof).

Therefore if you take a blood sample, you would probably take the sample from his arm, so when analysing the blood, there would be no difference between blood from a living person and blood from a drowned person (unless you take the sample from the capillaries around the alveoli).

Answer 3

Glucose, Red blood cells , White blood cells. Maybe few other things but nothing from the salt water or to say it would depend on how long they were in salt water before Drowning.

Answer 4

Well, since a person who drowns is usually asphyxiated, but has not metabolized a whole lot of water, I'd expect to see pretty much the same things in the blood as someone who was strangled, or smothered.

On average, the typical drowning victim has no more than a couple of teaspoons of water in his/her lungs.

Answer 5

a person immersed in either salt or fresh water will drown in about the same time. However, people tend to float much better in salty water than in fresh water. Anything floating in water is held up by a force we call buoyancy. Basically, buoyancy is caused by the difference in density between the water and an object floating in it. Salty water is more dense than fresh water - it has a bunch of salt dissolved in it, so its weight per unit volume is higher. That makes the difference in density between a person and the water they're floating in larger, and makes them more buoyant (they'll float higher in the water). This is somewhat noticeable in the ocean, but is particularly apparent in very salty water, such as is found in The Dead Sea, or the Great Salt Lake in Utah. In both of those lakes the water is so salty that a person will float on the surface very easily (in fact, if one swam below the surface that buoyancy force would cause them to float back to the surface as soon as they stopped swimming). So, although a person will not drown faster in fresh or salt water, it's much harder for that to happen in salty water.

Answer 6

Burst red blood cells as the salt causes them to take in too much water, swell and burst.....if I remember right from an Anatomy and Physiology class I took.
In doing a web search I found this, too.
It looks like you may see red blood cells with a decrease of normal oxygen content by what I read below:
Direct quote from website below:
Also, fresh water drowning differs from salt water drowning in terms of the mechanism for causing suffocation. Only a small amount of either kind of water is needed to damage the lungs and interfere with the body's ability to breathe. If fresh water is inhaled, it passes from the lungs to the bloodstream and destroys red blood cells. If salt water is inhaled, the salt causes fluid from the body to enter the lung tissue displacing the air.

Answer 7

Same thing you see in any blood sample .. the drowned person would have died without metabolising much, if any, of the water they drowned in.

Answer 8

well for one a person would have a lot of sodium in their body because of the salt water and their body would also be filled with water. you may also notice a bit of dehydration because of all the salt. i hope you pick me for best answer. bye.

Answer 9

if a person has drowned, cutting into the heart will release water, not drowned , air will be released

Answer 10

some of the cells might have exploded from the osmotic pressure from salt, but some could be ok.