Just how believable are historic blood
groups? There
was a post on the Facebook “Blood Bank Professionals Group” about it
today in which many people commented about the blood groups recorded on the history
of patients grouped whilst on military service which were later found to be
wrong.
Obviously you perform a confirmatory
group…
What if there’s a historic antibody
record? Do we trust that or are we sceptical of that too? With the passage of
time it isn’t unusual for blood group antibodies to fall below the level of
detection. Given that a patient turns up with a supposed history of (say)
anti-S, anti-Jk(a) and anti-Jk(b) do we just crossmatch antigen-negative blood
or do we phenotype the patient to see if the supposed antibody is plausible (leaving
aside the entire concept of auto-antibodies)
