Association of Hematocrit and Red Blood Cell Transfusion with Outcomes in Infants Undergoing Norwood Operation.

The objective of this study was to investigate the association between red blood cell (RBC) transfusion and hematocrit values with outcomes in infants undergoing Norwood operation. This study included infants ≤2 months of age who underwent Norwood operation with either a modified Blalock-Taussig shunt or a right ventricle-pulmonary artery shunt. Demographics, preoperative, operative, daily laboratory data, and postoperative variables were collected.

Strict vs lenient criteria for elution testing: comparison of yields between two tertiary care medical centers.

In this study, 2 patient populations, using different elution strategies, were compared to evaluate eluate yields under more and less restrictive conditions. An informative eluate was defined as one in which an antibody that could be clinically significant was detected in the eluate but was not detectable in the plasma at the time of elution testing. The results for 160 direct antiglobulin tests (DATs) and 160 elution studies were evaluated in 71 patients at the adult hospital (lenient criteria).