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Showing content with the highest reputation on 07/18/2021 in all areas

  1. My experience is that the BB reports out the antibody identification. Never the reactivity! If a titer is ordered the only thing reported is the titer or “too weak to titer”. As the rise in titer is the most relevant result, consistency in method and technique is very important, both within your hospital system and the reference lab you use. Physicians are interested in your results not the process. Keep that simple. If they have questions your Medical Director can enlighten them.
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  2. Disciplinary action over product wastage sounds like it is perhaps well intentioned but ignorant bureaucrats, not health care workers running the show. That's a big part of the problem in many institutions these days. We are fortunate in that the senior decision makers in our hospital are all physicians, nurses, etc., including the CEO, CMO, COO. Washing your hands before delivering babies turns out to be inconvenient but a better idea. Universal leukoreduction and avoiding infusion of ABO incompatible antigen and antibody are also better ideas than what we have done for decades or longer. These practices will save lives, reduce need for transfusions and actually save the system money overall, albeit at greater expense in the transfusion service. You are no doubt correct that there will be pushback from transfusion service staff used to doing things the old, easy, but harmful way, and hospital administrators who prioritize the wrong things such as budgetary tunnel vision over reduced harm. And blood centers are not likely to initially be all that interested in changing practices. But when the data says patients do better with universal leukoreduction and ABO matching, hopefully, in the long run the dogma will be replaced by data driven practices. May take a while.
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  3. Once clinicians understand that ABO mismatched platelets not only do not provide hemostasis, but make bleeding more likely/worse, they will be less willing to accept infusion of ABO mismatched antibody/antigen. Once blood transfusion services realize that infusing ABO mismatched platelets increases utilization by two fold, they will be more interested in making the effort to give ABO identical or remove incompatible plasma by washing. Doing the right thing for patients is never the wrong answer to the question. Our current practices are convenient for us and minimize waste. We need to prioritize clinical benefit over inventory control and waste reduction. What we are doing now is providing little to no benefit and actually harming patients in many instances. The bleeding rate in the PLADO (platelet dose study) in NEJM was 70%. That's not exactly a clinical triumph. Our bleeding rate is probably less than 5-10% employing ABO identical/washed platelets.
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  4. Cannot post the entire article due to copyright restrictions, but most institutions have access to NEJM through their library. If not, shoot me an email at neil_blumberg@urmc.rochester.edu and I'll send along the .pdf. If you are transfusing 40-60 platelets a day, giving ABO identical to group O and A individuals should be relatively easy. When patients are changing ABO blood group it becomes more difficult. We avoid transfusion ABO antigen and/or antibody that is incompatible with either original recipient type or donor type. Usually means washed group O red cells and platelets. That's the bad news. It does require time and effort, and as you say, med techs are in short supply. Here's the good news. If you transfuse ABO identical or washed compatible platelets you will use between 30-50% fewer platelets per patient, increasing your supply and decreasing your cost/problems. You will also use next to no HLA matched platelets (we used 3 out of 6,000 one recent year), you will have fewer febrile and allergic transfusion reactions, you will have fewer red cell as well as HLA antibodies made in recipients, and you may reduce TRALI and TACO. Obviously you have to have universal leukoreduction to start with. Selective leukoreduction misses about 50% of the patients who will become refractory, probably due to missed or delayed diagnosis of hematologic malignancy, aplastic anemia, etc. But the big attraction is you will have less bleeding, although that mainly affects the patients and the docs and nurses at the bedside. When you transfuse ABO major incompatible, which seems to be the default due to fear of hemolysis from minor incompatible, you don't get any increments, you use lots of platelets and the patients bleed more. (see references below) Bleeding causes lots of harm, but also impacts the blood transfusion service for obvious reasons. So figure out a way to start giving patients with aplastic anemia and acute myeloid leukemia who are newly diagnosed only ABO identical platelets and that will be a great start for the patients and the transfusion service. Those patients will bleed less, need fewer platelet transfusions, have fewer transfusion reactions, will not have positive DATs, and will likely survive their hospitalization and disease at higher rates if our experience is typical. And if you cannot give ABO identical or washed platelets free of incompatible cellular and soluble antigen and free of incompatible ABO antibody, start out with minor incompatible platelets (e.g., O to A) rather than ABO major incompatible (e.g., A to 0). The risks of hemolysis are not negligible (about 1 in 800) but are less serious and severe than having life threatening bleeding or refractoriness which occur more rapidly with ABO major incompatible in all likelihood. There's a ton of antibody that is incompatible with antigen transfused when we give A platelets to O recipients which means each antigen winds up with a ton of antibody making huge immune complexes. When we transfuse antibody incompatible we are transfusing a small amount of antibody into a recipient with huge amounts of antigen, so the size and number of immune complexes is probably smaller. These are my best guesses that we've been making exactly the wrong decision when we give ABO mismatched platelets. Best to avoid any, but major mismatched provides no hemostasis, minimal to no increment and is associated with increased bleeding mortality in the study from Columbia (David Roh and colleagues https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33649761/). But ABO identical is not that hard for larger centers for the 85% of patients who are group O or A. You just have to start small, get the hang of it, and then extend to other blood groups and other diseases than leukemia, MDS and aplastic anemia (including transplants, particularly allo--transplants). All those tables of how to select ABO mismatched platelets for transplant recipients are well intentioned but scientifically without evidence. Avoid infusing incompatible antigen and antibody as much as possible, and delay transfusion when ABO identical will be available within hours. Give priority to patient well being over inventory management. Give reduced doses, which work just as well. Get a Terumo or Haemonetics washing device and wash with PAS. It's a big set of changes, but neither terribly expensive nor rocket science. The dogmas and expert opinion about universal leukoreduction and ABO matching of transfusions are now proven to be tragically mistaken. https://www.ashclinicalnews.org/news/from-the-blood-journals/written-in-blood/outcomes-abo-incompatible-platelet-transfusions-patients-intracerebral-hemorrhage/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11399821/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21414009/
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