Kiev. Ukraine. Ukraine Gate – January 6, 2021 – Health
The blood transfusion procedure is considered one of the most common in medicine. When selecting donor blood, the blood type and Rh factor are taken into account, however, the results of a study by Dutch scientists indicate that the gender of both the donor and the recipient may be important.
The authors from the Medical Center at Leiden University studied data on the health of 31 118 recipients who had undergone a blood transfusion. They found out who the recipient was, and also analyzed information on the three-year survival rate of donors.
It turned out that men who received blood transfusions from women who had a history of at least one pregnancy were 13% more likely to die within three years after the procedure than male patients who did not receive such blood. The authors concluded that for men, the preferred donors were male or female donors who had never become pregnant. The risk group included only men under 50 years of age.
The authors have not yet proposed a scientifically substantiated explanation for the phenomenon they discovered, but they plan to continue research in this area. They suggest that pregnancy caused some changes in the functioning of the immune system of women and therefore transfusion of their blood could increase the likelihood of premature death of donors. However, this does not explain why such blood turns out to be “harmful” only for men under 50 years of age.
Many scientists were skeptical about the results obtained, expressing the hope that the criteria for the selection of donors and recipients for blood transfusion would not have to be changed. At least until there is evidence that men under 50 really shouldn’t be given blood transfusions to women who have ever been pregnant. They suggested that some other factors might have had an impact.
In earlier studies conducted by other scientists, no confirmation of this fact was obtained – neither the sex nor the age of the donors affected the health and life expectancy of the recipients.
