SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 19 2017, @11:37AM (2 children)
A case for a blockchain? Some of the recipients may become donors afterwards.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Thursday October 19 2017, @11:49AM (1 child)
Not anytime soon afterwards. There is (at least where I am, and anywhere else with a sane system) a significant delay (effectively quarantine) before any recipient is allowed to donate, for precisely this reason.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday October 19 2017, @12:10PM
Same here, there are a lot of restrictions at least in theory. But most of them depend on you as the donor telling the truth. There is some medical testing of the blood afterwards for obvious reasons. I think the rules are here that you can't be a male homosexual, you can't be pregnant, you can't have had unprotected sex with strangers, can't have been abroad to certain high risk disease countries (mostly third world places with less then ideal standards of healthcare), can't inject drugs, can't have been treated for any diseases or had surgery in the last six months and the list goes on like that. Still a lot of these things are really untestable -- unless they have a test for homosexuality or promiscuity they can't really know. There isn't any passport check either so they don't really know if I have been abroad or not. If I had surgery or got drugs to treat various illnesses they don't like they could possibly check that out or run tests for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV-tainted_blood_scandal_%28Japan%29 [wikipedia.org]