The northward spread of Lone Star ticks due to warmer winters has brought to New England a scary disease that, among other things, makes people allergic to meat and dairy. Now some Dartmouth Health researchers have found an unpleasant byproduct of this change: It also limits who can safely get certain blood donations.
As reported by Dartmouth Health news service:
Dartmouth Health’s Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC) has seen an uptick in recent years of patients with type O blood experiencing severe and even life-threatening allergic reactions after receiving platelets or plasma from type B or AB donors.
DHMC pathologists Nancy M. Dunbar, MD, and Richard M. Kaufman, MD, who led the study published August 24 in JAMA Internal Medicine, hypothesized that these patients may have pre-existing antibodies to alpha-gal from tick bites, and that hospitals in regions with higher concentrations of AGS patients, like DHMC, might also see an increase of allergic reactions in O patients receiving B or AB units.
The international team of researchers now reports that transfusion-related alpha-gal syndrome, or TRAGS, is a legitimate manifestation of AGS and should be taken into account in the safety practices of hospital transfusion services.
“We anticipate that this will change transfusion practices in the U.S., at least in AGS high-prevalence regions,” said Kaufman, the study’s corresponding author and a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Geisel. “DHMC has already taken the step to cease giving transfusions of B or AB platelets to O patients to avoid potential injury to these patients.”
Hospitals can give platelets and plasma from people with one blood type to patients who have a different blood types because those components, unlike red blood cells, don’t carry the antigens that cause a reaction. (At least, they didn’t until now.) This makes all my blood donations – 121 pints and counting – more valuable because they aren’t limited to helping other people with blood type A, which is the reason donation centers separate out the components in the first place.
Incidentally, this is a classic example of the cascading effects of environmental change. Who would have thought that increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere would make certain types of blood donations deadly to certain types of people? But such is the reality of life.
Note that you have to sign in to Dartmouth Health’s site to read the study.
