Calculating an ANC

After calculating an ANC for so many years, it seems like second nature to me. Neutropenia is the most common hematological abnormality in Shwachman-Diamond Syndrome. Many of the familys that contact Shwachman-Diamond America ask , "How do you calculate ANC?"

I have a page on our family website dedicated to neutropenia. I built this page many years ago in hopes that it would help people surfing the web to understand what neutropenia is, what causes neutropenia and how to figure out what a person's absolute neutrophil count is. Visit the hyper links in this post for more information on neutropenia and its causes. Here is the basic formula for calculating the absolute neutrophil count:

To obtain the Absolute count, one must multiply the relative value of each type of cell (neutrophils in our case) by the total WBC count. If a person has a total WBC of 6,000 and his differential shows 30% neutrophils, to figure the Absolute Neutrophil Count (ANC) we multiply 6,000 by 30% to arrive at an ANC of 1800.