Effect of deliberate blood transfusions in cadaveric kidney allografts at a single center.

The effectiveness of deliberate pre-transplant blood transfusions was compared in randomly transfused and nontransfused patients who acted as controls at a single transplant center. The patients in the pre-transplant transfusion group who had never been transfused had better graft survival than all other groups. Next, were those patients who had previous random transfusions and were then placed in the deliberately transfused group. Those who had received random blood transfusions but were not in the protocol and those patients who never had transfusions did the poorest. Those patients never transfused previously who received the scheduled transfusions had far lower levels of antibodies than those who had had previous transfusions and those with previous transfusions who were then entered into the prospective transfusion protocol. The patients who had B cold cytotoxic antibodies had the highest graft survival rates. Timing was important, with the group receiving the last transfusions 3 to 6 weeks before transplantation doing significantly better than any other group. Histocompatibility locus-A and B antigen distribution among the groups did not bias the data.