Post-operative course of coronary artery bypass surgery patients who pre-donate autologous blood

BACKGROUND: Pre-operative autologous blood donation is used to reduce the need of allogeneic blood in patients undergoing coronary bypass surgery operations, but it is not clear what impact the blood donation has on the post-operative course of these patients. METHODS: We studied the post-operative course of 210 patients who pre-donated autologous blood before their coronary bypass operation (donors) and of 67 patients who were eligible to pre-donate but did not (controls). RESULTS: The clinical variables and the technical operative parameters of the patients in the two groups were similar. There was no significant difference between the duration of assisted ventilation post-operatively (756 +/- 197 vs. 802 +/- 395 min; P=0.54) or length of stay in the intensive care unit (1.8 +/- 1.1 vs. 1.7 +/- 0.9 days; P=0.52) of the two groups. The number of autologous units of packed red cells and of fresh frozen plasma (FFP) received by the donors was significantly higher than the number of units of allogeneic packed red cells (1.5 +/- 0.9 vs. 0.3 +/- 0.9; P=0.001) and the units of homologous FFP received by the controls (2.3 +/- 0.8 vs. 0.6 +/- 1; P=0.001). CONCLUSIONS: We found no evidence that autologous blood donation exerted a negative influence on the post-operative course of patients undergoing coronary bypass surgery. Patients who pre-donated blood received no allogeneic blood products, but the number of autologous blood products received by donors was higher than the number of blood products received by patients who did not pre-donate.