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, @04:41AM (4 children)
Girl to dracula: Ha-ha, I had an abortion, sucka! You be ded in no time now.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 19 2017, @04:43AM
This answers the age old question about virgin sacrifice, monsters just don't want a bad immune reaction!
Goooooooo SCIENCE!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 19 2017, @04:44AM
Dracula: I'm 5000 years old, not 50, stupid slut.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by stretch611 on Thursday October 19 2017, @05:53AM (1 child)
May that be the blood in Trump's next transfusion.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by DannyB on Thursday October 19 2017, @01:22PM
Trump will not be afraid of such a transfusion. This fake news was a scientific study. We don't need no steenkin' science! Just ask Trump's science advisor. Oh, wait. He doesn't have one. Maybe he doesn't need such a useless position in his administration.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Thursday October 19 2017, @04:49AM (17 children)
Die of what?
The linked article says: All-cause mortality during follow-up.
So the male wounded soldier goes back to the front lines, the lumber jack goes back to logging and the female professional goes back to her calculations or her law practice.
The small numbers involved in this study could be overwhelmed by the level of risks incurred by virtue of their profession.
There is a wide disparity between male and female mortality [nih.gov] due to injury.
----
The other interesting thing is how few female blood dinners there are:
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 5, Informative) by takyon on Thursday October 19 2017, @04:58AM (1 child)
Draculan slip?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Informative) by aristarchus on Thursday October 19 2017, @06:18AM
Sorry, got to say it! With frojack, one can never be sure.
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Thursday October 19 2017, @05:07AM (9 children)
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).
This is discussed in the comments on Stat News. An Anon had this to say:
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Thursday October 19 2017, @05:25AM (4 children)
When making a point about an error, you should ensure that your own writing is correct. That should be '[sic]'.
Now, someone else will point out the mistake (or mistakes) that I made in my posting.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 19 2017, @05:29AM (1 child)
Punctuation goes inside quotation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 19 2017, @08:21AM
If you're a crazy person yes.
If you want to have some order in your thoughts, you realize that the quotation is a smaller part of a whole (i.e. the full sentence), and therefore it should be enveloped in the whole, i.e. the sentence-relevant punctuation goes OUTSIDE the quotation.
For pure dialogue, the punctuation goes inside the quotation because it is part of the quoted communication.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday October 19 2017, @05:47AM (1 child)
Here's the mistake in your post: WHOOOOOOOOSH.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Touché) by Whoever on Thursday October 19 2017, @02:18PM
It has to be funny before a "Whooosh" is appropriate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 19 2017, @06:15AM (1 child)
If it doesn't disappear expect to see similar studies performed on transgender people (assuming those studies don't already exist). What's the death rates of transforming people?
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 19 2017, @06:28AM
You stupid fucking (or not, apparently) cuckservative!! Shirley you gnow that the immunity granted to mothers is from the leakage of fetal stem cells through the placental wall. Oh, you did not know that? You must be a stupid conservative, denying science all the time, and never reading anything that might force you to admit you are wrong, and that you are wrong because you are stupid.
So, it is not surprising that the blood of mothers would confer the same benefits on the donors of these mother's blood? Or do we have to take khallow out to the woodshed again to give him some "education"?
(And, oh, for you Catholic pedophile fucks, it does not matter whether the woman carried to term or not, the same benefits devolve regardless of your fucking homosexual puritan boy-buggering moral attitude towards women. I hear the Virgin Mary has joined the "Me, too" thing on Twitter! Alleujah! )
(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.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday October 19 2017, @08:52PM
No, followup studies pretty much cease when the patient dies.
The numbers you quoted address the population, however the claimed results were not based on the whole population, but only those that died within three years.
They took all the deaths, traced it back to transfusions and if even one transfusion was from a previously pregnant woman they fell into that cohort.
(Most people getting a transfusion get more than one bag, and the bags are not matched for source. So its highly likely that anyone who got blood from a previously-pregnant woman also got blood from other women or men, unless they only ever needed exactly one bag).
Also, your figures for female donations in the Netherlands does not appear to have been the case in this study. Female sourced blood was a very small percentage here.
There are a lot of problems with this study. Until they go back and remove accidental deaths, or intentional deaths (homicides/suicides/drug ODs) the whole thing is suspect.
If they can test for a causal route, a difference in the blood (say for example: once-pregnant female blood carrying fewer/different immunity agents due to the need to tolerate a foreign "infection" for 9 months) then there would be a vector that they could study.
But as long as non-disease-related deaths are included it seems pretty hokey. And the other guys study doesn't support it.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1, Troll) by aristarchus on Thursday October 19 2017, @06:52AM (4 children)
But then, oh wise and merciful frojack, there are many female blood diners, especially amoungst the mosquito species, where it almost exclusively (well, not almost) the female of the species that dines on blood! And not to mention, spread Dengue, West Nile, Zika, malaria, and a whole host of nastly blood bourne diseases! So what are we to make of this? Women giveth, and females taketh away-eth? Or are you just pumping your usual uncertainty concern trolling, of which you are a past master here on SolylentNews! I have never seen anyone so subtly inject something like this into a discussion like this before. Unless it was about Anthropogenic Global Climate Change brought about by the Blood of our Mothers! Seriously, frojack, is this not a bit much, even for you? Not saying it is not effective, but is it moral?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 19 2017, @08:24AM (1 child)
I may agree with your dislike of him, but you're being an asshole. It was an honest typo, get over it already.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Thursday October 19 2017, @08:51AM
Whatever are you talking about? Frojack is my friend! Public record, check it out. And besides, typos are often either very revealing, or the basis for wonderful new discoveries! Surely you share my optimism? (Oh, BTW, all the assholes are actually over in the "naked eye Uranus" thread at the moment, so none here now, sorry. )
(Score: 5, Funny) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday October 19 2017, @04:31PM (1 child)
There once was a vampire named Mabel
Whose cycle was incredibly stable
Come ev'ry full moon
She'd pull out a spoon
And drink herself under the table
(All the best limericks are dirty :D)
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 19 2017, @09:46PM
There was a young lady from Bude
Who went for a swim in the lake
A man in a punt
Stuck an oar up her nose
And said, "It really is very dangerous to swim in here."
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday October 19 2017, @06:49AM (3 children)
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.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Thursday October 19 2017, @11:42AM (2 children)
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)
That's what I described. Note the word "first" at the end of my post.
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
Touche - missed that, note to self: read to the end
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday October 19 2017, @09:03AM (3 children)
This shouldn't really be all that much of an issue. They would just have to make some more room on that sticker that is on the bag to have a giant M or F to denote gender next to the blood type. Also it should be fairly easy to follow, not sure if this is international standard or not but on the blood bags here (Sweden) when I donate there is a barcode that is linked to me as the donor so if it later turns out that I banged hookers, had lots of gaysex, got AIDS or just started to do a metric fuckton of drugs they could just pull all my bags they have in storage or start testing everyone that got my blood. Since it's linked to me they could also then denote as to what surgeries they had been used it. So I'm male so apparently I'm always great blood wise but the principle should be the same if they need to find female blood bags, from donors that have been pregnant that have been used in the surgery of males. Shouldn't be an issue to scale the experiment up to national levels.
(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]
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Thursday October 19 2017, @10:05AM (5 children)
I'm always a bit baffled when I see a tech/sci site being overly imprecise. From the summary, emphasis mine:
So, if I'm reading this correctly, the donor's sex doesn't appear to have an impact — their reproductive status does. That's a pretty big difference, given plenty of women donate before they've ever been pregnant, and many others either are infertile, never had sex with a man (e.g. lesbians) or made damn sure they couldn't get pregnant (e.g. combining an IUD/shot with spermicide & condom/diaphragm).
That level of imprecision is a bit like using the word "vehicle" in place of "motorcycle" when reporting on crash fatality statistics.
(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.
(Score: 3, Informative) by looorg on Thursday October 19 2017, @12:02PM (2 children)
... and this is why you read the actual article. Most of the baffeling-factor seems to be resolved by RTFA. I think most of your questions, relevant or not, are actually mentioned in one way or another. The summary is short, the article is somewhat longer and I suspect that the report will go into quite a bit more detail. They are probably also going to be a lot more precise about actual definitions. But overall there seems there are indication that there is just not an issue of having reproduced or not and that it might just be about male vs female. There might not be a difference but there could be a difference, so further studies are clearly needed.
Anyway while female recipients of female (ever-pregnant or not) doesn't seem to be an issue there seems to be an issue for the males. But there are also studies that seem to indicate that there are issues with male-2-female transfusions. Which is a real problem since males can donate blood much more often then women. So there ought to be a lot more male blood in the pipeline even if there are actually the same amount of donors (men donate up to four or five times per year and women only three). Also females are not allowed to donate blood when pregnant or for another nine months after delivery (or however the pregnancy ended) so there should be more male then female blood around.
The social construct people are going to be so mad ...
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday October 19 2017, @09:21PM (1 child)
Good catch.
Have to admit I didn't read the whole detailed study, just the linked summary.
It appears the researchers actually did have a mechanism in mind, but they failed to follow up with the donors beyond simple gender determination.
Seems a shame they got sloppy on so many other aspects as well. They couldn't test what they wanted to test, so why proceed with the study at all?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(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.
(Score: 1) by Woosh on Thursday October 19 2017, @12:53PM (3 children)
So for transgender blood donations is the patient's survival rate the average of the two? Also how long does it take a sex change operation to change their male blood to girl blood and vice versa?
(Score: 2) by rylyeh on Thursday October 19 2017, @08:59PM (2 children)
The same amount of time it takes for a comment like this to be acceptable!
"a vast crenulate shell wherein rode the grey and awful form of primal Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss."
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday October 19 2017, @09:22PM
Hey, his user name is Woosh. You weren't expecting serious discourse were you?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by Woosh on Friday October 20 2017, @06:47PM
It doesn't have to be acceptable, only tolerable.
#MeToo
(Score: 1) by curril on Friday October 20 2017, @05:43PM
Pregnant women often have children with conflicting blood types; they build up more sensitivity to them each pregnancy and can even die from it. So if an RH negative woman has had an RH positive child, she has probably built up antigens to RH+ blood. Normally RH- blood is fine to donate to RH+ patients (not vice-versa, though), but if a woman donates RH- blood that has antigens to RH+ blood to an RH+ individual, it's possible that the antigens trigger enough of an immune response in the patient that it reduces the long term survival rates.