ORIGINAL ARTICLE Targeted Preoperative Autologous Blood Donation in Total Knee Arthroplasty Reduces the Need for Postoperative Transfusion

gous blood has been widely used to minimize the potential risk of allogeneic transfusions in total knee arthroplasty. A previous study from our center revealed that preoperative autologous donation reduces the allogeneic blood exposure for anemic patients but has no effect for non-anemic pa-tients. Questions/Purposes: The current study investigates the impact of a targeted blood donation protocol on overall transfusion rates and the incidence of allogeneic blood trans-fusions. Methods: Prospectively, 372 patients undergoing 425 unilateral primary knee replacements were preoperative-ly screened by the Blood Preservation Center between 2009 and 2012. Anemic patients with a hemoglobin level less than 13.5 g/dL were advised to donate blood, while non-anemic patients did not donate. Results: Non-anemic patients who did not donate blood required allogeneic blood transfusions in 5.9 % of the patients. The overall rate of allogeneic trans-fusion was significantly lower for anemic patients who donated autologous blood (group A, 9%) than those who did not donate (group B, 33%; p<0.001). Donating autolo-gous blood did increase the overall transfusion rate of ane-mic patients to 0.84 per patient in group A compared to 0.41 per patient in group B (p<0.001). Conclusion: This investi-gation confirms that abandoning preoperative autologous blood donation for non-anemic patients does not increase allogeneic blood transfusion rates but significantly lowers overall transfusion rates. Keywords anemia. total knee arthroplasty. bloodmanagement.preoperative autologous blood donation. allogeneic transfusio