We have always washed our cord blood specimens six times prior to testing.  I believe it is to prevent contaimination with Wharton's jelly, etc.   I can't really find any references about this practice, so am curious -  do other people out there wash cord blood specimens prior to testing?

We do for manual tube testing.   

 

We didn't for the provue just checking for clots before testing. 

 

We perform cord blood testing mostly on the TANGO. We only check for clots and centrifuge for 5 min. prior to testing. It does not require us to wash the cells. If we test using tubes then we wash x4.

14 hours ago, Rita said:

We have always washed our cord blood specimens six times prior to testing.  I believe it is to prevent contaimination with Wharton's jelly, etc.   I can't really find any references about this practice, so am curious -  do other people out there wash cord blood specimens prior to testing?

With respect to the Acid Elution; according to procedure instructions in the package insert the cells are washed once with saline and four time with working wash solution but saline can be substituted for the working wash solution if none specific bonding is suspected; this would be a total of five washes in saline. Long ago when we had a very large blood bank lesure for documenting all testing and transactions, the blood bank supervisor explained that washing the cells excessively; six times or more could cause a loss of the antigen and therefore it would not be detected. We currently wash cord cells a maximum of four times prior to testing to remove Worten's Jelly and other unbound stuff.

Edited January 12, 20169 yr by rravkin@aol.com

We don't wash - unless there is some type of discrepancy.  Washing is the first step in our discrepancy investigation

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We don't wash - I can't remember the last time we had an issue with a cord sample (other than mislabelling).

We only do cord bloods in tubes, so YES we do wash at least 5 times sometimes we will rewash if the results look funky.

We get enough cord blood specimens that are nasty that all tube testing is done after the cells are washed 6 times. When I tilt the collection tube and the specimen runs down the inner wall in a stringy looking stream, I know that those washes are going to be essential. I question the method used to collect the specimens, but have no control over it. Based on the appearance of the specimen tubes, I suspect that sometimes they hold the cord over the open tube, open the clamp and let it run in until (over)full. I'm planning to automate cord blood testing in the next few months, so the condition of the exterior of the tube will then become an issue - let the battle begin!

We test in gel so don't wash.  If we did manual, we would wash 4x

If we do it in the gel, we do not wash.

Discontinued routine washing of cord blood cells for standard tube testing decades ago.  Routine washing assumes all cord blood samples are contaminated to the extent that false-positive results would be obtained without washing. In the absence of supporting data,  it is a "solution looking for a problem".

Thank you everyone - I really appreciate your input!