Patient was educated on PT reading from the PT/INR test as follows:
- PT stands for prothrombin time. It is the time taken for a person’s blood to clot. This reading is measured in seconds.
- Normal result for a healthy adult is 11 – 14 seconds.
- Based on various factors, a person’s blood could be thin (difficult to clot) or thick (risk for an easy clot) and can result in altered readings from the usual normal.
- With patients who are on blood thinners, this number will be higher than the normal health adult, indicating that it takes longer for them to clot. If this number is too close to the normal (11 to 14 seconds), it indicates that the blood is thick and the patient is at increased risk to clot.
- Different labs use different PT tests and so, the results vary slightly from one another. Since these results are lacking a standardization, a new ratio was created using the PT result. This ratio is called INR (International Normalized Ratio), which allows a comparison between different lab results for PT with more accuracy.
