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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 looorg on Friday October 20 2017, @06:40AM
It might be that they didn't find out until the project had already started, that happens all the time -- you gather data for one thing and while doing that you find something else. You can't just start over then cause you got (grant-) money to do X and not Y. So you have to proceed.
Also in this case I would assume they are not actually gathering data themselves directly from patients but they might get them from hospitals or from government agency that gathers this data, certainly so if they want some kind of long periods of time. So all the data might just not be available, as in they didn't bother to store data on the things you liked or are looking for.
There might also be an ethics board issue, a much more severe then normal case since it will include data on women that have been pregnant - not only normal pregnancies but also abortions (by choice or from other reasons) and then they want to know the sex of their offspring. I would gather it's all sensitive. Problem is also then once you got the green light for the initial project from the ethics board if you want to change something you have to go back and restart and apply again for that process and get the green light again. So it's just better to finish the initial project while all the time talking about, or having, your future or next project in mind.
These are just some issues on the top of my head, I have not done medical research before but I assume they run into the same issues as the rest of us doing research.