Frozen blood transfusions and renal allograft survival.

It has been shown that kidney transplant graft survival rates were lower among nontransfused patients than among those receiving transfusions. In a relatively small series of 49 patients who received frozen blood only the 1 year transplant survival rate was 42+/-7% as compared to 49+/-5% in 190 patients with whole blood transfusions and 31+/-4 in 143 patients with no transfusions. We conclude that frozen blood transfusions appear to be better than no transfusions, but may be inferior to whole blood in prolonging graft survival.