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Some more non-settled science, courtesy of The Ottawa Hospital:
A large Canadian study has shown a link between blood donor characteristics and transfusion recipients' outcomes. This is the first study to suggest that red blood cell transfusions from young donors and from female donors may be associated with poorer survival in recipients.
Guess the old simple classification system of sorting all blood into a couple of types was too simple. Just because blood doesn't cause an instant life threatening reaction doesn't mean it is totally compatible.
And like any good science article, the conclusion is "more research is needed!"
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Researchers Find Association Between Donor Age, Female Sex and Transfusion Outcomes
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But what can you do with it?
-- ubiquitous cry from Linux-user partner
(Score: 4, Funny) by hemocyanin on Wednesday July 13 2016, @12:40AM
Finally, something old men are better at -- bleeding!
(Score: 1) by eapache on Wednesday July 13 2016, @12:59AM
The original article spells it right, just a typo I assume.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday July 13 2016, @01:30AM
Thanks.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Informative) by Dunbal on Wednesday July 13 2016, @01:19AM
Guess the old simple classification system of sorting all blood into a couple of types was too simple.
There are well over 50 different "types" of blood type. The ABO and Rh classifications are just the two most common ones because those will generally kill you within minutes if you get it wrong. That doesn't mean that having incompatible Lewis [wikipedia.org] or Diego [wikipedia.org] phenotypes won't end up killing you through a hemolytic anemia a few months down the road.
Remember when you were in high school and learned all that complicated math stuff? Unless you later chose math as a university major and an advanced degree, you thought that was as complicated as it gets - but in reality it gets far more involved than that. Well, same for biology, believe it or not.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday July 13 2016, @05:40AM
More like "Research finds that if you throw enough free variables into something, you can eventually find a sort-of straight line even if you have to use a double-antilog graph for it". There's a ton of similar research along these lines, e.g. that the teenage suicide rate tracks the number of Porsche's on the road, and other astounding correlations.
(Score: 4, Informative) by sjames on Wednesday July 13 2016, @08:25AM
That's exactly why donor blood is cross matched with the recipient except in emergency transfusions. The process can detect incompatibilities even of unknown types.
(Score: 2) by TheLink on Wednesday July 13 2016, @02:40PM
I've a suspicion that an uncle's blood type is XO+ ...
Not sure if his blood is flammable though. ;)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 13 2016, @04:51PM
Remember when you were in high school and learned all that complicated math stuff?
No, because they don't teach math in high school. Instead, you play games of Jeopardy! on homework and tests. This is sometimes confused with math, but it's actually totally different.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday July 13 2016, @01:20AM
The article is filled with disclaimers. Beginning with the fact that the study is "observational" and not "definitive". Recipients of young women's blood had the highest chance of being dead within a few years, for any and all reasons. Some sorting might be helpful. It's hard to blame a young female's blood for a death caused by a random murderer, for instance. Or a plane crash. More research is definitely needed. If the youngest donor's blood was given to the most aged patients, and vice-versa, then of course the ultimate outcomes are going to be slanted.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Wednesday July 13 2016, @01:56AM
I wish they wouldn't publish these sorts of studies outside of relevant journals.
As a source of ideas for further research this is a perfectly fine study, but as you point out, it's not reliable as a matter of public health policy.
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Wednesday July 13 2016, @01:56AM
I find the results suspicious as well but IANABiologist. TFA says 30,503 transfusion recipients and 80,755 donors in total. Would seem that they had a decent sample size.
The average age of the recipients was 66.2 years and their outcomes were followed for an average of 2.3 years with a maximum follow-up time of 7.2 years.
Hmm, didn't control of length of time of follow-up. That seems like a source of error.
The average age of the recipients makes me wonder whether this isn't really about deaths but maybe younger red blood cells prolong life? Not sure I have a theory about the gender aspect to pull out of my rear.
There definitely could have been better controls.
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Wednesday July 13 2016, @02:03AM
Oh, gender theory to pull out of my ass! Here we go—this one could also explain the age differences. What do we know about blood donor demographics? Do they skew young and male? Some other way?
Could be nothing to do with the blood itself.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 13 2016, @12:42PM
Given that the recipients, on average, were old, the age effect could also just be that blood from someone of the same age works better than blood of someone of a different age.
Is there a sex inequality in the recipients? If more men than women were recipients, it could again just mean that blood from the same sex is better for you than blood from the opposite sex (note: I used sex, not gender, on purpose; if there's an effect, it's most likely related to the genes, not to what you feel you are or should be).
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Wednesday July 13 2016, @02:14PM
Oh of course we're talking about X/XX/XY/XXY/XXX/whatever. I had assumed it was completely obvious that nobody cares if the blood has the wrong hormones. Why did you even feel the need to bring that up? Why the fuck would you even think that's statistically significant? In 80,000 however many it was donors, you're going to find maybe three to five trans women (depending on who you listen to for your demographic statistics) and a trans man if you're lucky. You might even turn up one of those other rare pokémon (intersex, androgen insensitive, you name it) depending on the luck of the draw.
Here's the problem. I have no objection to presenting medically accurate information when donating blood in an ideal world. It just makes sense. If you can somehow convince TERFs and Christians to go soak their heads, that would be great. I'll keep having fun freaking guys the fuck out by using their bathroom. The more insane things get, the ruder I can be about it. Just keep imaging that linebacker in a dress. Yes, yes, that's what all us faggots look like. Yes, yes, trans men don't exist. My advanced infiltrator [wikia.com] mode has never worked so well! Have a good day!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 14 2016, @05:42AM
Because you wrote "gender", not "sex".
If you think I consider any gender effects to be statistically significant, then you seriously lack reading comprehension.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday July 13 2016, @02:01AM
The dataset looks big enough that most of those flukes should have averaged out of the final results. Something weird seems to be going on, something unexpected. Those sort of results are where the interesting new science tends to come from so this is a case where the "more research needed" is apt.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 13 2016, @02:48AM
Bichez be takin the big blaq dyuk!
Old women not such fuqqqqin whores like them newiest ones.
N old white males dun take the BBC.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 13 2016, @03:28PM
Put "female sex" in the headline and this is what happens.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by migz on Wednesday July 13 2016, @06:46AM
The thing with statistics is that you need to know what the original populations are that the samples were drawn from.
In this case the populations are the donors and the recipients. Until we know more about the composition of these groups we can't make the kinds of associations made in the summary.
If there are a disproportionally large number of young female donors then I expect this spurious outcome.
I speculate that this could be likely given that recipients of transfusions are disqualified from donating, and that woman are more likely to receive transfusions due to childbirth.