I’m a regular blood donor and often Excedrin user. I always wondered why they ask that if it doesn’t exclude you and now I know! It’s to stop you from donating platelets.
I’m assuming based on @Oly’s comments, it’s not like you are getting “1 unit O+ from @Meatros ” so the volume of markers would be slow low once diluted within your own blood volume. Added to this fact generally healthy people don’t get blood transfusions.
I suppose that is theoretically possible, but I highly doubt it would ever be a problem. Any appreciable amount of biomarker would be in the fresh frozen plasma (FFP) component, so only a person receiving that component would be “at risk” of this confounder. But the amount of biomarker in one unit of FFP would be very small. One unit of FFP represents less than 1/10th of donor blood volume, so only a 1/10th of the biomarker would be in there, and it would be diluted roughly 10x in the recipient. Plus, some (maybe all) biomarker could be lost and/or altered during processing and storing the FFP. And plus, since we’re taking about a mild heart attack, you’d likely be starting out with a small biomarker “donation” from the get go. Keep in mind that people on medications of all sorts still donate blood; some small fraction of that medication undoubtedly carries over into the recipient, and that’s not a problem. Then overarching all of that you’d have to have a scenario where a person is receiving FFP and at the same time being tested for biomarkers of cardiac damage, as they only run those tests when clinically indicated. Having those two situations overlap seems unlikely.
One thing I could add to my previous post: I pretty much poo-pooed the notion that donating blood could cause a problem for someone who just had a mild heart attack, but I thought later that by donating, that does cause the donor’s heart to work a little bit harder while they make up for the lost volume. So that’s a potential thing.
A heart attack means part of your heart was deprived of oxygen long enough to cause lasting damage to its muscle cells. This presumes a problem with supplying enough oxygen, often due to a blockage or clot in some of the blood vessels.
In theory, donating blood might temporarily reduce the amount of oxygen one can supply. This effect is temporary, and healthy people compensate for this in other ways.
I would not recommend donating blood soon after an infarct or if one has unstable angina. The blood is unlikely to harm the recipient. But the safety threshold for the donor is already reduced and the heart attack is evidence that this is so. One probably would not run into a problem but why chance it?
Several, actually, and the levels follow very reliable trends. Qadgop would certainly know more.
That’s how they knew my grandmother had had a heart attack several days earlier.
p.s. The Red Cross has a 6-month deferral after a heart “incident”.
Blood Donor Eligibility Criteria | Red Cross Blood Services.