• Anesthesiology · Jan 2013

    Erythrocyte storage duration is not associated with increased mortality in noncardiac surgical patients: a retrospective analysis of 6,994 patients.

    • Leif Saager, Alparslan Turan, Jarrod E Dalton, Priscilla I Figueroa, Daniel I Sessler, and Andrea Kurz.
    • Department of Outcomes Research, Pathology and Laboratory Medicine Institute, Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, OH 44195, USA. saagerl@ccf.org
    • Anesthesiology. 2013 Jan 1;118(1):51-8.

    BackgroundMore than 5 million patients receive erythrocyte transfusions in the United States every year. Previous studies linked the storage duration of allogeneic erythrocytes to the risk of severe postoperative complications, especially after cardiac or trauma surgery. Limited data are available for noncardiac surgical patients. We therefore evaluated the association between storage duration of transfused erythrocytes and postoperative all-cause mortality among general surgery patients.MethodsPerioperative data corresponding to 63,319 adult, general surgery patients were obtained from our registry and merged with blood product data. Patients receiving solely leukocyte-reduced, allogeneic erythrocyte transfusions were included. Multivariable Cox proportional hazards regression was used to characterize the relationship between median erythrocyte storage duration and postoperative mortality rate, adjusting for characteristics plausibly influencing the storage duration of erythrocytes.ResultsOf the 6,994 patients included in the final analysis, 23, 44, 11, 9, and 13% received 1, 2, 3, 4, and ≥5 erythrocyte units, respectively. The authors found no evidence that increasing median storage duration was associated with a difference in the risk of postoperative mortality (hazard ratio, 0.99 [0.94-1.04]; P = 0.64). Analyzing the mean storage duration of erythrocyte units as a function of year of transfusion, the authors demonstrate a relevant decrease in utilization of the oldest blood units, whereas young blood storage duration remains nearly unchanged.ConclusionThe authors' study supports the recent literature in surgical and medical patients and underlines the importance of sufficiently powered randomized trials to finally resolve the erythrocyte storage duration debate.

      Pubmed     Free full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…