Compared to patients who receive larger blood transfusions during surgery, heart disease patients who receive smaller blood transfusions did just as well and faced no greater risk of dying from other diseases, according to a Rutgers study.
Researchers followed 2,016 patients for as long as four years. Half of the patients received larger quantities of transfused blood and the other half received smaller transfusions, some of which were smaller by as much as two thirds.
The Rutgers team, led by Jeffrey Carson, MD, chief of the division of internal medicine at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, found no evidence of increased mortality due to the size of a post-surgery blood transfusion.
"There has been a steady decline in the amount of blood in transfusions given to patients in the past three to five years," said Dr. Carson. "I think it is very reassuring that we have found that using less blood is OK and not just from a short-term perspective, but from a long-term perspective."
Results of the study were published in the journal Lancet.