Blood Gases Level 1 Tutorial: Blood Gases
Please wait.. Please wait...
Tutorial: Blood Gases
Learn an organized approach to arterial blood gas analysis, incorporating serum and urine electrolyte values into your more advanced levels of analysis.
How to level up?
Develop your skills by completing our Practice Cases!
Choose Level
Tutorial: Blood Gases Summary of Approach to ABGs
Lessons
42
Times Practiced
1284
Cases Completed
1h 24m
Total Time spent
1m 24s
Average Time
Progress
Accuracy
Efficiency
Accuracy
Efficiency
1 Acidosis or Alkalosis Acidosis or Alkalosis
2 Shifting chemistry Shifting chemistry
3 Metabolic or Respiratory Metabolic or Respiratory
4 Compensatory Processes Compensatory Processes
5 Degree of Compensation Degree of Compensation
6 Abnormal Compensation Abnormal Compensation
7 Anion Gap Mechanism Anion Gap Mechanism
8 The Delta Delta and Acid Base Ddx The Delta Delta and Acid Base Ddx
Current lesson 9 Summary of Approach to ABGs Summary of Approach to ABGs
Summary of Approach to ABGs
This is a quick overview of the steps you need to perform in order to thoroughly and accurately interpret ABGs.

Please pay very close attention to the fact that if you do not perform all the steps, you will miss important details. For example, the ABG 7.40/40/90/24 is 100% normal, but if I told you that there was an anion gap of 20, this ABG all of a sudden becomes very abnormal.

The Steps to Intrepret the ABG:
  1. Acidemia or Alkalemia?
  2. Primary respiratory or metabolic or both?
  3. Compensated? (and how much)
  4. Over compensated? (this means 2 primary disorders)
  5. Aniong gap present?
  6. Delta delta present? (this means 2 primary metabolic disorders)

These are a lot of steps. Interpretting ABGs is a skill. These lessons provide you with the theory, but do not actually train up your skills. Please go now to our ABG practice module and practice your ABG interpretation skills!