Abstract
Preoperative autologous blood donation (PAD) in bone marrow (BM) donors is performed to meet potential post-harvest transfusion needs and to avoid the risk of allogeneic transfusions. We reviewed retrospectively bone marrow harvests in 216 healthy donors during a ten-year period to determine the use of autologous blood.
All donors except four had undergone PAD. The initial hemoglobin level of 153 g/L (male donors) and 135 g/L (female donors), respectively, decreased by about 8 g/L after preoperative blood donation and by 23 g/L after bone marrow harvest (medians).
Autologous blood was administered to 70% of donors, 30% of the units remained unused. The evaluation of the risk of reaching transfusion threshold (= 20 kg more than recipients failed to reach >= 3 x 10(8)/kg TNC recipient.
Our findings affirm previous data that PAD is unnecessary for healthy marrow donors and may be indicated individually after considering the pre-collection hemoglobin level, donor and recipient weight, and expected blood loss. Reasonable substitution cut-offs have to be set together with clinical symptom evaluation.
The effective use of PAD also requires an adequate time interval between PAD and BM harvest.