Saturday 13 June 2015

Heart patients on aspirin should not donate platelets

Today is World Blood Donor Day

Heart patients on aspirin should not donate platelets 

Most medications taken by blood donors pose no known risks to recipients. In most cases, only small quantities of drugs are present in a unit of blood and the drugs will undergo significant dilution in the recipient's plasma volume. However, every donor must disclose what drugs he or she is taking as some of them may not be friendly with the recipients, said Padma Shri Awardees Dr A Marthanda Pillai, National President Indian Medical Association (IMA) and Dr K K Aggarwal Honorary Secretary General IMA on the occasion of World Blood Donor Day.

In December 2007, the US FDA made recommendations that apheresis platelet collections should not occur from donors who have taken aspirin, aspirin-containing drugs, or piroxicam in the previous 48 hours, or from donors who have taken clopidogrel or ticlopidine in the previous 14 days. This restriction is specific to plateletpheresis donors and does not apply to whole blood donors unless platelets made from that unit of whole blood will be the sole source of platelets for a given patient. This is especially for platelet transfusions designated for neonatal and young pediatric recipients.

Donors who are taking warfarin, heparin, or another anticoagulant are temporarily deferred (up to seven days).

Five drugs pose a teratogenic risk: etretinate and acitretin used for severe psoriasis, isotretinoin used for severe acne and finasteride and dutasteride used for prostate enlargement.

For isotretinoin and finasteride, the deferral period is one month and for dutasteride, it is 3 years. Deferral period is permanent for etretinate. Donors are permanently deferred if they have taken bovine or human growth hormone derived from pituitary glands due to the risk of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

The deferral period for donors who have received hepatitis B immunoglobulin or an unlicensed vaccine is one year.

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