Use of polyethylene glycol for performing autologous adsorptions.

BACKGROUND

Our reference adsorption procedure is to autoadsorb serum with ZZAP-pretreated patients' red cells (RBCs), although it is time-consuming. The aim of this study was to evaluate the use of polyethylene glycol (PEG) for performing autologous adsorption procedures without pretreatment of patients' RBCs.

STUDY DESIGN AND METHODS

Equal volumes of patient's plasma, patient's RBCs, and PEG were mixed. This mixture was incubated for 15 minutes at 37 degrees C, and the adsorbed plasma-PEG mixture was immediately harvested to proceed to the antiglobulin test with anti-immunoglobulin G. The ZZAP-adsorption procedure was performed in our reference laboratory.

RESULTS

Thirty-one samples were detected with warm autoantibodies in pretransfusion testing. A total number of 58 autologous adsorption procedures were performed with PEG in 870 minutes (mean, 28 min) and alloantibodies were detected in 4 (13%) cases (anti-E in 2 cases and anti-E + K in 2 cases). Our reference laboratory performed a total number of 61 adsorption procedures with ZZAP in 3660 minutes (mean, 118 min) and detected the same alloantibodies specificities.

CONCLUSION

The PEG autologous adsorption procedure is an efficient method of enhancing autoantibody adsorption and alloantibody detection and decreasing the labor-intensive testing required by the presence of serum warm autoantibodies in pretransfusion samples.