Giving blood today, I was impressed with how much questioning took place beforehand. I think my initial interview was about 15 minutes or so.
One thing they didn’t ask me about was use of low-grade stimulants such as caffeine. Had I knocked down a few espressos this morning, and then immediately gone and given blood … would that particular pint have some stored-up caffeine (as it were)? If so, would the potential recipient of that pint feel some kind of a lift from the caffeine (assuming conciousness and lucidity)?
Would there be any effects from taking, say, acetaminophen before donating blood? Other over-the-counter (OTC) drugs? I was asked specifically about various prescription drugs, and then about prescription drug use in general … but they weren’t interested in the OTC drug use information that I volunteered.
I’ve wondered about this too. You can’t have taken aspirin for three days before pheresis but acetaminophin is OK, but I assume that is specific to the blood thinning. I take SSRIs and have always been able to donate no problem. Is there some way to filter them out?? because plasma and platelets get used before the time it would take them to leave my system.
I always wondered along similar lines. I was struck that they never ask about alcohol, so if I came in after a few drinks and wasn’t visibly drunk( i assume they wouldn’t siphon off someone who looked drunk), could whoever got my blood share some of that?
I gave blood Tuesday and instead of the interveiwer asking the questions, they left me alone with the computer and I did a self test. It had the same questions normally asked, it was just a bit more private. It went a bit faster too!
I dunno about caffeine, but I can help with the alcohol and the aspirin questions.
Alcohol as a small molecule with both hydrophobic and hydrophilic ends transfers very rapidly out of the blood into the tissues. Crosses the blood-brain barrier like nobody’s business (of course, otherwise, we wouldn’t feel drunk).
When a person driving drunk crashes his car and survives long enough to be whisked to the OR, and dies on the table, even if he was transfused enough units and crystalloid to replace his entire blood volume once, his ethanol level will be 95% of what it was before transfusion. This is because the alcohol rediffuses into the blood from the cells to which it has transferred. The only way to lower it is to let time pass with an intact and perfused liver.
A person who has had two drinks in an hour may have a blood alcohol of 0.03 mg %. This is not enough to give anyone who receives the blood a buzz.
As for aspirin, it’s an irreversible (noncompetitive) inhibitor of prostaglandins. It binds to the active site of the enzyme permanently. This means any platelet with aspirin on board is a nonfunctional platelet - I’ve been told, sort of like a Bernard-Soulier platelet. The only way to clot normally after aspirin is to replace the platelet with a new platelet. Total replacement takes about two weeks.
Tylenol (acetaminopen) and NSAIDS (ibuprofen, naproxen for example) are reversible inhibitors of the same enzyme site. They bind reversibly with the active site. Lots of them are bound when their concentration is high, but they begin to diffuse away from the platelet as their concentration drops in the blood around the platelet, and after four to six hours, their level is negligible. The platelet is active in forming the hemostatic plug again.
However, there are the follow-up clsrifying questions. Exactly which pills or medications did you take in the last four weeks? Which countries in Europe did you visit, when and for how long? And sometimes they have a poilcy of reading the sex ones to you for a verbal answer.