“…This progressive augmentation of coronary flow maintains overall myocardial oxygen delivery and occurs with a ~2-fold increase in MVO 2 and little/no change in myocardial oxygen extraction [10, 19, 34, 35, 47, 64, 67, 68]. However, evidence of enhanced myocardial lactate release and impairments to both sub-endocardial blood flow and cardiac contractile function have been reported with more severe reductions in hematocrit (≤ 10%) [1, 3, 37, 45, 64]. Earlier studies have suggested a role for reduced blood viscosity in the coronary response to anemia [5, 31, 33, 46, 62].…”