Noninfectious adverse effects of blood transfusion in the neonate.

There are many potential noninfectious complications that may be associated with the transfusion of blood products to the neonate. Most of these can be avoided by the careful preparation of the product according to current standards and the careful monitoring of the infant for metabolic changes during a transfusion. In general, there have been fewer systematic studies of transfusion-associated complications in neonates than in adults, possibly because of the difficulty of establishing a cause-effect relationship in the neonatal patient population. Such data, if available, would be useful for providing more effective blood product therapy to the neonate.