After an injury, it may occur that our blood doesn’t clot sufficiently for days, causing our wounds to bleed constantly. This can be a sign of hemophilia, which happens due to a lack of clotting proteins in our blood. A more concerning factor is when your injuries cause internal bleeding. Hemophilia induces excessive blood flow into our body, making it tough to control. It is important to identify symptoms of hemophilia and seek early treatment if diagnosed with it.

Symptoms

Identify if you’re at risk of hemophilia by looking for these prominent symptoms:

• If you’re experiencing unusual bleeding from wounds or cuts several days after the injury. Also, if you have excessively deep bruises on different areas of your body.
• Frequent nosebleeds that are difficult to control.
• If you have received an injection and find that you are bleeding. It could indicate a lack of clotting factors.
• Stiff ankles, knees, and elbows that hurt when you move.
• Blood in stools or urine.
• Hard-to-stop bleeding of gums merely after losing a tooth or after dental work.
• An injury on the head can cause bleeding into the brain due to hemophilia. Symptoms of this include frequent vomiting, fatigue, seizures, throbbing headache, and dizziness.

Treatment

Hemophilia is treated by replacing absent or low blood-clotting factors, or, by inducing the release of stored factors. By means of injecting into the vein, treatments aim to build up resistance to excessive blood flow. Those diagnosed with hemophilia may seek these treatments:

• Through replacement therapy, the missing or low clotting factors in the blood are replaced. When replacement clotting factors are formulated in a lab, they are known as recombinant clotting factors. This is often sought over clotting factors extracted from human blood. Synthetically, lab-produced clotting proteins decrease the chances of infections being transmitted through human blood. Rixubis is a factor IX replacement therapy. It is a purified protein that got approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2013. It can control excessive bleeding for those diagnosed with hemophilia B.
• A regular treatment of replacement therapy might be sought in chronic cases of hemophilia A. This is known as prophylactic therapy. It keeps the lower level of a factor in our blood at more than one percent. This level is enough to stop most spontaneous bleeding.
• On-demand treatment is mostly done at home, where blood clotting factors are released into the bloodstream to curb early instances of uncontrollable bleeding.
• A mild case of hemophilia A can be treated with desmopressin (DDAVP). It releases von Willebrand’s antigen that is stored in the cells and platelets that inhabit the lining of our blood vessels. This antigen stores factor VIII, which seals our bleeding blood vessels and treats hemophilia.