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posted by martyb on Thursday October 19 2017, @03:35AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-would-a-vampire-prefer? dept.

A study has found an increased chance of mortality of men who received blood donated from previously pregnant women:

Each time health care workers grab a pint of blood for an emergency transfusion, they make sure the donor and recipient have compatible blood types. But they do not pay attention to the donor's sex. A new study raises questions as to whether that should change.

In the first large study to look at how blood transfusions from previously pregnant women affect recipients' health, researchers discovered men under 50 were 1.5 times more likely to die in the three years following a transfusion if they received a red blood cell transfusion from a woman donor who had ever been pregnant. This amounts to a 2 percent increase in overall mortality each year. Female recipients, however, did not appear to face an elevated risk. The study [DOI: 10.1001/jama.2017.14825] [DX] of more than 42,000 transfusion patients in the Netherlands was published Tuesday in JAMA The Journal of the American Medical Association.

The American Red Cross and the researchers themselves were quick to say the study is not definitive enough to change the current practice of matching red blood cell donors to recipients. But if this explosive finding is confirmed with future studies, it could transform the way blood is matched—and it would suggest millions of transfusion patients worldwide have died prematurely. "If this turns out to be the truth, it's both biologically interesting and extremely clinically relevant," says Gustaf Edgren, an expert who was not involved in the study but co-wrote an editorial about it. "We certainly need to find out what's going on." Edgren, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Karolinska Institute and a hematologist at Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm, says his own research [DOI: 10.1001/jamainternmed.2017.0890] [DX] suggests the donor's sex makes no difference to the transfused patient. "Our data is really not compatible with this finding," he says.

Also at Reuters, Medscape, and Stat News.


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  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday October 19 2017, @06:49AM (3 children)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Thursday October 19 2017, @06:49AM (#584402) Journal

    The American Red Cross and the researchers themselves were quick to say the study is not definitive enough to change the current practice of matching red blood cell donors to recipients.

    But is there any harm in changing practices now? As far as I can tell, it would just amount to writing the donor's sex on the blood bottle, and when selecting the blood, looking for a match in same-sex bottles first.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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  • (Score: 2) by choose another one on Thursday October 19 2017, @11:42AM (2 children)

    by choose another one (515) Subscriber Badge on Thursday October 19 2017, @11:42AM (#584479)

    But is there any harm in changing practices now?

    There _might_ be harm from effectively reducing availability, particularly with rarer blood types. On the other hand if the effect is a small additional risk there would be very limited harm and some, maybe significant, benefit in having M/F as a _preferred_ type match but with the option of using mismatched if no match available. The effect clearly isn't as large or immediate as a problem as a normal blood type mismatch.

    There are probably some folk on the ultra right/religious side of things who would object to having a "homosexual" donation (as opposed to a donation of unknown sex), but many of them will object to any transfusion anyway, so not sure we should care.

    And God knows what the "non-binary" folk are gonna do, have to count as universal recipients I guess, otherwise they're probably f***ed...

    • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday October 19 2017, @04:31PM (1 child)

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Thursday October 19 2017, @04:31PM (#584645) Journal

      On the other hand if the effect is a small additional risk there would be very limited harm and some, maybe significant, benefit in having M/F as a _preferred_ type match

      That's what I described. Note the word "first" at the end of my post.

      And God knows what the "non-binary" folk are gonna do

      Well, since this is about biological traits, I'd say the rule is simple: Have an Y chromosome, get male blood. Have no Y chromosome, get female blood.

      Actually, since apparently the effect is only there f there was a past pregnancy, one can even circumvent the sex/gender problem at the spender side: Simply ask them "have you ever been pregnant?" and divide the blood into "with pregnancy" and "without pregnancy".

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
      • (Score: 2) by choose another one on Thursday October 19 2017, @07:23PM

        by choose another one (515) Subscriber Badge on Thursday October 19 2017, @07:23PM (#584779)

        That's what I described. Note the word "first" at the end of my post.

        Touche - missed that, note to self: read to the end