[Open heart surgery without homologous blood transfusion in elderly patients]

Preoperative autologous blood donation has been widely accepted to perform surgery in orthopedics, gynecology and cardiac surgery. In elderly patients, however, it has been supposed that most of these patients have anemic tendency before predonation as well as poor response to erythropoietic stimuli, so that preoperative blood deposit is limited to apply them. In order to reduce homologous blood transfusion in open-heart surgery, preoperative blood deposit, combined with erythropoietin administration and intraoperative blood salvage, have been routinely used even for the elderly patients in our hospital since 1989. In present study, we verified above concepts and obtained the results that demonstrated little differences in the blood reproducing ability, the rate of predonation, and the recovery after the operation, between the elderly and the younger. We concluded that autologous blood transfusion combining preoperative deposit with intraoperative blood salvage was the efficient and safe method even in the elderly patients.