Autologous blood transfusion in patients undergoing hip replacement surgery.

Introduction: Autologous blood transfusion is a set of procedures done in order to collect a patient's blood and reinfuse it during or after a surgical intervention. The aim is to meet the patient's need for blood products without allogeneic transfusion. By observing the hemoglobin and hematocrit values during blood donation in the pre-operative and post-operative period and by counting transfused blood units, the aim of this article was to detect whether there was any difference between the patients receiving autologous blood and those receiving only allogeneic blood.

Material And Methods: This prospective study was performed at the General Hospital "Dorde Joanović" Zrenjanin from October 24th, 2011 to January 24th, 2013. The study included 60 patients who were divided into the experimental group of 30 patients who had been transfused autologous blood and the control group of 30 patients who had been transfused only allogeneic blood.

Results: The average values of hemoglobin and hematocrit in the first and the second donation were 148.9 g/l and 44.2%, and 138.7 g/l and 40.8%, respectively. Oral iron preparation was given to 12 patients for two weeks before the first donation. The level of hemoglobin and hematocrit in both groups of patients had approximately the same values in the pre-operative and post-operative period. In the post-operative period, 2.53 units were transfused per patient in the experimental group and 3.73 units were transfused per patient in the control group.

Conclusion: Administration of pre-operatively donated autogenous blood reduces the number of transfused deplasmatised erythrocytes units in comparison to the number of units transfused to the patients receiving only allogeneic blood products. The pre-operative use of oral iron preparations increases hemoglobin values significantly.