Related Experiment Videos
Platelet crossmatch evaluation in refractory hematologic patients
Although previous investigators have attempted to identify platelet crossmatching methods that could be used routinely for pretransfusion testing, such studies have excluded patients with underlying clinical conditions inherently associated with low corrected platelet increments. Because many refractory hematologic patients have such underlying conditions, we decided to assess the usefulness of platelet crossmatching (in addition to HLA matching) in determining the posttransfusion corrected platelet count increment in eight medically complicated patients who received a total of 35 single-donor platelet transfusions. In this limited study, the predictive value of a negative crossmatch was only 55%, whereas that of a positive crossmatch was 88%. The test used had a sensitivity of 65% and a specificity of 83%. The results of our study suggest that platelet crossmatching may be a useful additional study for predicting the outcome of transfusion--even in medically complex cases--if it can be done rapidly and relatively inexpensively.
Although previous investigators have attempted to identify platelet crossmatching methods that could be used routinely for pretransfusion testing, such studies have excluded patients with underlying clinical conditions inherently associated with low corrected platelet increments. Because many refractory hematologic patients have such underlying conditions, we decided to assess the usefulness of platelet crossmatching (in addition to HLA matching) in determining the posttransfusion corrected platelet count increment in eight medically complicated patients who received a total of 35 single-donor platelet transfusions. In this limited study, the predictive value of a negative crossmatch was only 55%, whereas that of a positive crossmatch was 88%. The test used had a sensitivity of 65% and a specificity of 83%. The results of our study suggest that platelet crossmatching may be a useful additional study for predicting the outcome of transfusion--even in medically complex cases--if it can be done rapidly and relatively inexpensively.