Bleeding Disorders

What is a Bleeding Disorder?
Bleeding disorders is a general term for a wide range of medical problems that lead to poor blood clotting and continuous bleeding. Doctors also call them terms such as coagulopathy, abnormal bleeding and clotting disorders.

When someone has a bleeding disorder they have a tendency to bleed longer. The disorders can result from defects in the blood vessels or from abnormalities in the blood itself. The abnormalities may be in blood clotting factors or in platelets.

Blood clotting, or coagulation, is the process that controls bleeding. It changes blood from a liquid to a solid. It's a complex process involving as many as 20 different plasma proteins, or blood clotting factors. Normally, a complex chemical process occurs using these clotting factors to form a substance called fibrin that stops bleeding. When certain coagulation factors are deficient or missing, the process doesn't occur normally.