Health Of Blood Donors Research Articles

Evidence‐based selection criteria to protect blood donors

A safe and adequate blood supply depends on healthy, volunteer blood donors. Blood centers have instituted various screening procedures in an effort to determine that donors are free of diseases that can be transmitted to patients by blood transfusion and are able to tolerate the collection procedure without experiencing significant complications. This review focuses on selection criteria intended to minimize the risk to the blood donor. Defining a rational, evidence-based approach to donor selection is crucial not only to take reasonable precautions to protect the donors' health but also to eliminate practices that lead to the unnecessary deferral of large numbers of people without improving the safety of the donation process. Donor selection criteria, including predonation pulse and blood pressure, donor weight and total blood volume, minimum hemoglobin and donation interval, are considered against the available evidence that support or suggest the need to modify the current approach to protect blood donor health.

Community blood donors' knowledge of anemia and design of a literacy‐appropriate educational intervention

The purpose of this project is to improve the health of blood donors by educating and motivating them to seek medical attention for anemia. The National Anemia Action Council, BloodCenter of Wisconsin, and the Medical College of Wisconsin formed a partnership to engage volunteer blood donors and develop an educational intervention to motivate donors with anemia to seek appropriate medical care. Partners developed an educational pamphlet and conducted two focus groups with volunteer blood donors for feedback. Participants were recruited from volunteer donors at BloodCenter of Wisconsin found to have anemia (men age, 18 years and older with a hematocrit [Hct] level of <38%; women age 50 years and older with a Hct level of <36%) at blood screening before donation. Participants (n = 25) addressed their understanding of anemia, information they received after being deferred, their reactions about the deferral, and comments on the educational material. The educational pamphlet was revised based on focus group comments. Volunteer donors are extremely dedicated and interested in increasing their understanding of anemia and the ability to continue donation. Community members' feedback on educational material is a valuable resource to improve the literacy level of information.

Improving health profile of blood donors as a consequence of transfusion safety efforts

Transfusion safety rests heavily on the health of blood donors. Although they are perceived as being healthier than average, little is known about their long-term disease patterns and to which extent the blood banks' continuous efforts to optimize donor selection has resulted in improvements. Mortality and cancer incidence among blood donors in Sweden and Denmark was investigated. All computerized blood bank databases were compiled into one database, which was linked to national population and health data registers. With a retrospective cohort study design, 1,110,329 blood donors were followed for up to 35 years from first computer-registered blood donation to death, emigration, or December 31, 2002. Standardized mortality and incidence ratios expressed relative risk of death and cancer comparing blood donors to the general population. Blood donors had an overall mortality 30 percent lower (99% confidence interval [CI] 29%-31%) and cancer incidence 4 percent lower (99% CI 2%-5%) than the background population. Mortality rates and cancer incidence were lowest for outcomes that are recognized as being related to lifestyle factors such as smoking or to the selection criteria for blood donation. Blood donors recruited in more recent years exhibited a lower relative mortality than those who started earlier. Blood donors enjoy better than average health. Explicit and informal requirements for blood donation in Scandinavia, although mostly of a simple nature, have successfully refined the selection of a particularly healthy subpopulation.

The Canadian Blood Donor Health Assessment Questionnaire: Lessons From History, Application of Cognitive Science Principles, and Recommendations for Change

Over the last 20 years, the Canadian Blood Services' (CBS) Donor Health Assessment Questionnaire (DHAQ), used to screen prospective blood donors to determine their eligibility, has grown in complexity and length. Its growth is inextricably linked to the evolution of the environment within which CBS operates from unregulated collection and distribution of labile blood products to a fully regulated environment and to the need to satisfy both Health Canada and US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requirements. Within this context, the development of the CBS DHAQ has been characterized by addition of questions and items without any periodic reevaluation of the need for retaining existing questions and/or items. In this review, we apply principles from cognitive science relating to how people think when answering questionnaires to the situation of blood donors completing the DHAQ. We show that some items that were added at different times in separate questions, for reasons that were historically relevant, could be now asked more simply with a single question. The historical development of the DHAQ, resulting in the condensing of many items into lists, the use of complex wording, and the sheer number of items included in the questionnaire make accurate retrieval of information from the donor's memory difficult. Thus, we believe that redesigning the DHAQ will improve the quality and accuracy of the donors' answers to screening questions.

Correlation between the state of health of blood donors and the corresponding mid-infrared spectra of the serum

We observed differences between the mid-infrared spectra of sera originating form healthy volunteers and from patients with diabetes mellitus or rheumatoid arthritis (RA). These differences were found to be significant within particular regions of the spectrum both in terms of the χ 2 test as well as the Kolmogorov–Smirnov significance level. Comparing the samples drawn from diabetes patients and samples from healthy volunteers, the significant contributions are located around 1026 cm −1, where there is a known glucose absorption peak. In a subsequent evaluation we investigated the correlation between the outcome of a discriminatory classification approach, namely disease pattern recognition (DPR), and the glucose signature in the infrared spectrum. Although the correlation analysis is indicative for a correlation between the DPR-score and the glucose concentration, the metabolite concentration alone does not suffice for the complete correlation of the DPR-score with the actual state of health, i.e. “healthy” or “diabetic”. In the case of RA the DPR-scores of independent validation samples correlate better with the state of health than the rheumatoid factor (RF) alone.