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Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Jehovah's Witnesses may recover from heart surgery faster.

Bloomberg News (7/3, Ostrow) reports, "Jehovah's Witnesses, whose faith forbids them from blood transfusions, recover from heart surgery faster and with fewer complications than those who do get blood, in a study that may change thinking on current practice." The study, published online in the Archives of Internal Medicine, found that "patients who are Jehovah's Witnesses had better survival rates, shorter hospital stays, fewer additional operations for bleeding and spent fewer days in the intensive care unit than those who received blood transfusions during surgery."
        Reuters (7/3, Pittman) reports that investigators looked at data on more than 300 Jehovah's Witnesses who underwent heart surgery and a similar number of heart surgery patients who were not Jehovah's Witnesses.
        Forbes (7/3, Husten) reports that, "compared to patients who had transfusions, Witnesses had better short term and long term outcomes." The investigators found that Witnesses also "had fewer complications in the hospital and better survival out to 15 years."
        HealthDay (7/3, Mann) reports that "Dr. Victor Ferraris, a professor of vascular surgery at the University of Kentucky Chandler Medical Center in Lexington," wrote "in an accompanying journal editorial" that "the findings of this analysis...add to the increasing data that suggest that more conservative use of blood transfusions would be in our patients' interest, in both Witnesses and non-Witnesses."

2 comments:

  1. Jehovah's Witnesses blood transfusion confusion

    It is misleading to imply that there is NO RISK refusing blood transfusions which is how the Jehovah's Witnesses Watchtower will spin it.
    It's only *elective surgery* for patients who are not in ER bleeding to death and in a modern hospital that has all the latest blood conservation gadgets.
    How safe is all the thousands of pints of blood that Jehovah's Witnesses do use?

    Jehovahs Witnesses take blood products now in 2012.
    They take all fractions of blood.This includes hemoglobin, albumin, clotting factors, cryosupernatant and cryo-poor too, and many, many, others.
    If one adds up all the blood fractions the JWs takes, it equals a whole unit of blood. Any, many of these fractions are made from thousands upon thousands of units of donated blood.
    Jehovah’s Witnesses can take Bovine *cows blood* as long as it is euphemistically called synthetic Hemopure.
    Jehovah's Witnesses now accept every fraction of blood except the membrane of the red blood cell. JWs now accept blood transfusions.
    The fact that the JW blood issue is so unclear is downright dangerous in the emergency room.
    More than 50,000 Jehovah's Witnesses dead from Watchtowers deadly arbitrary blood ban. That is 50 times more than died at Jonestown massacre,some estimates run as high as 100,000 dead
    ---
    Danny Haszard

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  2. Thanks Danny Haszard for your comments but the purpose of citing this article was to add to the knowledge base regarding peri-operative blood transfusions.

    This was purely an observational study that had to use major statistical modeling in an attempt to get matching groups. Unfortunately there is no way to control for several biases. These bias would include selection bias (you can imagine the surgeon only taking those Jehovah Witness' that they felt had the lowest risk of bleeding), nothing is mentioned about other differences in the groups regarding their treatments (you can imagine they may draw smaller blood volumes, use pediatric tubes for instance for the Jehovah Witness patients) and though they tried to match over several variables felt to predict outcome they may not be the right ones. Personally I find the article interesting but one can't ignore the statistical gymnastics that were involved in trying to create comparable groups with missing data points, changes in practices over the treatment years, etc...

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