Word.ws English Dictionary

pseudohypoxemia

pseudohypoxemia noun: a spurious measurement of oxygen saturation of blood, giving a false appearance of hypoxemia; it can happen via technical problems (such as a malfunctioning pulse oximeter) or even when all technical details are correct but hyperleukocytosis or thrombocytosis is present and the testing method is blood gas analysis.

Noun

pseudohypoxemia (uncountable)

  1. A spurious measurement of oxygen saturation of blood, giving a false appearance of hypoxemia; it can happen via technical problems (such as a malfunctioning pulse oximeter) or even when all technical details are correct but hyperleukocytosis or thrombocytosis is present and the testing method is blood gas analysis.
    • Pseudohypoxemia or spurious hypoxemia represents a low oxygen tension or saturation in an arterial blood sample that does not correspond with the actual levels in the body. […] A young patient with leukemia and extreme leukocytosis (hyperleukoctosis) who demonstrated pseudohypoxemia is described...1998, Valentina Di Boscio, Udaya Prakash, “Pseudohypoxemia caused by hyperleukocytosis”, in Journal of Bronchology, volume 5, number 1, pages 43-46
    • Pseudohypoxaemia or spurious hypoxaemia is a recurrent problem faced on arterial blood gas analysis in patients with hyperleucocytosis leading to management dilemmas and unnecessary respiratory interventions. Various methods have been suggested to reduce the magnitude of this problem.2012, K.N. Prasad, Prabhu Manjunath, L. Priya, and Sanjay Sasikumar, “Overcoming the problem of pseudohypoxemia in myeloproliferative disorders: another trick in the bag”, in Indian Journal of...

Origin of pseudohypoxemia

From pseudo- + hypoxemia.

Questions about pseudohypoxemia

What does pseudohypoxemia mean?
Pseudohypoxemia means a spurious measurement of oxygen saturation of blood, giving a false appearance of hypoxemia; it can happen via technical problems (such as a malfunctioning pulse oximeter) or even when all technical details are correct but hyperleukocytosis or thrombocytosis is present and the testing method is blood gas analysis.
What part of speech is pseudohypoxemia?
Pseudohypoxemia is a noun.

Words near pseudohypoxemia in the dictionary

  1. pseudohypocone
  2. pseudohypocones
  3. pseudohyponatremia
  4. pseudohypoparathyroidism
  5. pseudohypoparathyroidisms
  6. pseudohypoxemia
  7. pseudohypoxia
  8. pseudohypoxic
  9. pseudoideal
  10. pseudoideals
  11. pseudoidentities

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pseudohypoxemia (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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