A patient has been admitted to the emergency department with the following arterial blood gas results:

This is just a classic ABG interpretation question. You likely won’t see many of these on the TMC Exam because at this point, the NBRC will assume that you already know how to interpret ABGs. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have made it this far.

 With that said, you still absolutely MUST know how to interpret them because you will be required to do so for SEVERAL questions on the exam.

So now let’s go ahead and interpret this one. The pH is decreased which means acidosis. The Bicarb is severely low which tells us that there is a metabolic issue. The PaCO2 is also low, because in this case, the body is hyperventilating to try to blow off some CO2 in order to bring the pH back up into the normal range.

However, it has not compensated enough to fully bring the pH into the normal range, so we know that it is only partially compensated. That means that the correct answer is B.

The correct answer is: B. Partially compensated metabolic acidosis