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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.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Thursday October 19 2017, @11:29AM (1 child)
Correct, well, assuming I read it correctly. However, if we are right it means the professor quoted in TFA has read it wrong, or is being dumb. "Our data is really not compatible with this finding," - you're wrong Professor, if your data (as you say) supports that donor sex has no impact that it is clearly, entirely compatible with this new research, which shows that donor sex isn't a problem (there are other studies that say it may be), but donor previous pregnancy, on the other hand, looks like it may be.
Thing is, there are medically plausible mechanisms for this. Pregnancy messes, a lot, with your immune system. The immune system is in effect also critical in transfusion, blood typing is all about antibodies/antigens. There are also antibodies (Rh) that we already know can cause a problem both in pregnancy and in transfusion, and there are permanent effects on the mother _after_ pregnancy (Rh- mother carrying Rh+ child is not typically a problem the first pregnancy, only second onwards). In fact the mechanism could be something to do with Rh (maybe an RH- donor who has previously had Rh+ child isn't really an Rh- anymore?) as the study doesn't appear to control for it - quite possibly they don't have enough (detailed) data to do that.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday October 19 2017, @09:12PM
Then there is the birth order affect for males [wikipedia.org] to consider.
Clearly something changes in mothers that would appear to testable in the blood, and which lingers long after the end of pregnancy.
It would be interesting to see if the baby's gender of pregnant transfusion donors altered the correlation discovered in this study.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.