PREVENTT: preoperative intravenous iron to treat anaemia in major surgery: study protocol for a randomised controlled trial.

Background: Anaemia is common in patients undergoing major surgery. The current standard of care for patients with low haemoglobin in the peri-operative period is blood transfusion. The presence of preoperative anaemia is associated with an increased likelihood of the patient receiving peri-operative transfusion and worsened outcomes following surgery, more post-operative complications, delayed recovery and greater length of hospital stay.

False positive Kleihauer results: an unusual cause in a postnatal patient in remission from acute myeloid leukaemia.

A 34-year-old woman, in remission from acute myeloid leukaemia, had a positive postnatal Kleihauer result. Following our standard local protocol for positive Kleihauer tests in Rh-D negative patients, the specimen was referred for confirmatory testing, which proved the result to be false positive. Hereditary persistence of foetal haemoglobin was excluded as a Kleihauer test performed in a pregnancy prior to the development of leukaemia was negative.

The management of antenatal venous thromboembolism in the UK and Ireland: a prospective multicentre observational survey.

This prospective observational study reports on 126 women from 25 UK centres with image-proven antenatal venous thromboembolism (VTE), 62% deep vein thrombosis and 38% pulmonary embolism. Thrombophilia screening was of limited benefit except to identify antithrombin deficiency. Sixteen (13%) patients had previous VTE, all but one was related to previous pregnancy or combined oral contraceptive and 12 received no thromboprophylaxis in the index pregnancy, the other four thus received inadequate low molecular weight heparin (LMWH) doses.