Whats normal for your family?

This is one for all of you who have more than one member of the family who has ever had a full blood count.

I've got two kids who seem to have blood issues at the moment. Dougie with ITP seems to sit around 30K at the moment, and his brother Roger seems to vary between 100-140K (he has other problems with white cells). Dougie's count has not been above 120 since ITP started. The range of course is 150-400 in the UK anyway, and I've been naively assuming that the average is about 250 (in the middle!).

I've wondered whether there was any family connection since Roger's count started getting monitored. So when my eldest son had an accident a fortnight ago, and I knew he had had several blood tests while he was in hospital, I thought I would ask what his count was, just out of curiosity. The answer (177) seems to confirm to me that 120 would be a very "normal" count for Dougie were he ever to achieve it again!

So now I've seen a count for 3 out of 4 of my kids and they've all been pretty near the lower end of normal.Is this how platelet levels work, so that you could assume that a family would all have around the same sort of level? Has anyone else had more than one kid tested? I am wondering whether I should ask the hospital to test my remaining son sometime, although I am not quite sure what this would achieve....

Yours in curiosity, Ali

Me: 280k
Wife: 260k
Daughter: 202k
Tonio: as of 2 days ago, 20k

Thats an interesting question, i don't know if my parents and sister have ever had the need to have a full blood count done before. They have had blood taken in their lives, but i dunno if they have ever been told what their platelet count is.

We have never had the family checked, but I will say that your level of satisfaction changes after 6 years with ITP. Now, if my daughter is over 50k, we are thrilled (that is a save level for her). It is interesting this topic comes up, because my youngest daughter bruises pretty easy so we are getting ready to get her levels checked as well.