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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 19 2017, @12:10PM
[quote]If I'm reading it right, ~13,144 men got blood from a man, ~896 men got blood from an ever-pregnant woman, ~896 men got blood from a never-pregnant woman. It could be statistical noise, but we've seen studies with much smaller sample sizes.
The effect could disappear in follow-up studies, or this could be enough of a clue to find a possible cause (hormone imbalance in the donated blood, for instance).[/quote]
Isn't that a bit of the point of statistics... taking out the noise from your data set? Is the experimental setup and statistical analysis (testing is just one part of the analysis) were correctly performed, this should be confirmed. The 1.5x difference is quite big. The total recorded amount of deaths in this research is 3969, so 1.5x would result in at least a few dozen extra deaths in that one class compared to the others. Also, the fact that the effect doesn't surface in women receiving the same blood, makes this quite convincing for me.