After donating blood a couple of times so far this year, I have begun to ponder blood transfusions. I always took them as something normal, maybe watching them happen on TV or in films. But I began to wonder. For example, what exactly is being transmitted when the blood of one person enters into the bloodstream of another person? I’m type AB+ for example. What if I were to receive type 0 (or any other compatible type)? Would the 0 mingle and eventually become AB+ after a while? If the person’s blood I received had antibodies against say smallpox or any other vaccination or disease this person had been through, do I benefit from this? Am I subsequently immune as well?
And lastly, the part of this post that makes me post in Great Debates instead of in the General section: Are there psychological traits which are transmitted as well? Have there been any cases where an individual who received the blood of another began to manifest any traits or psychological characteristics of the blood donor? Now that I have written this, my thought has turned to organ transplants, thinking along the same lines with the same questions.
As well, why is it that at least one religion is so specific about prohibiting blood transfusions?
About the religious proscription against transfusions, it’s based on a prohibition in Leviticus (I’m pretty sure) on eating blood. Those groups who eschew transfusions for that reason are interpreting “eating” to include “taking into your body by any route whatsoever.”
I don’t mind the thread being moved. Adding a new question:
What if I were involved in some horrible accident, great loss of blood and receive transfusions of many litres of blood of another type, would my blood type ever change? What is my blood type dependent upon?
Your blood type can be catalogued based on the types of antigens and antibodies in your plasma and on your cells. Those factors originate in your bone marrow, which will not be induced to change its behavior, no matter how many transfusions you have undergone. That’s genetically determined.
A whole blood transfusion, for example, is just what it says - it’s blood with all the plasma, cells, and so forth that came from the donor. Whole blood transfusions are not as common as they used to be, as splitting blood into components reduces some types of transfusion risks, and means the medical industry can get more use out of each pint donated. So a person may get a transfusion of just red blood cells, or just clotting factors extracted from many pints of whole blood (that’s how hemophilia is treated), or immune components. That way, the patient gets only what’s needed rather than a bunch of other stuff that’s not needed that could actually be used for someone else.
Nope. Blood cells only live for a limited amount of time. In a case like that, the type O cells would eventually die and be eliminated just like any other dead blood cell. In about a month they’d all be gone from your system.
My understanding is that while antibodies can be passed on in whole blood transfusions any such immunity is temporary. Immune factors called immunoglobulins can be extracted from blood and have some use in treating disease (rabies shots used after a bite, for example, use immunoglobulin among other things). Yes, you can benefit, but as I said it’s temporary. It can help you while your own immune system gets up to speed on an infection.
Such immune factors can also cause problems - if a donor has a lot of IgE in his/her blood, for example, the recipient of that blood may experience allergic symptoms during or after transfusion. There are people who are not allowed to donate blood because their blood contains antibodies that will attack any recipient of their blood.
This is another reason why doctors try to minimize whole blood transfusions - if you just separate out the components actually needed by a patient you lessen the chances of such bad reactions,
No.
Any such phenomena are a result of the placebo effect.
Now, severe medical conditions can result in changes to a person’s outlook, thoughts, and habits, and they might be attributed to, say, an organ transplant but there is no basis for the notion that an organ recipient acquires any personality traits of the donor.
For Jehovah’s witnesses it’s a Bible passage against eating blood.
No. As noted, donor blood cells have a limited lifespan. Your own blood type is dependent on your genes and thus is fixed at conception. The only conceivable way to permanently change your blood type would be to kill off all of your own bone marrow (a medical procedure with significant risk of killing the rest of you, too) and replace it with donor blood marrow with a different genetically determined blood type, as bone marrow is what generates new blood cells. This, by the way, is not done with medical bone marrow transplants as transplanting bone marrow of a different blood type into your body would greatly, greatly increase the chances of graft vs. host disease, where the donated marrow attempts to kill off the recipient. This is not a side effect you want to experience.
While there may be answers that disagree with each other, this s still more of a General Question than a Great debate and more posters who have those answer are likely to hang out in GQ, as well.
Off to General Questions.
Note that blood cells only live for about 100 days. (And many of those days may have already gone by when it is transfused into you). So any changes will obviously be very temporary.
I suppose that if the blood you received contained an unusually high level of some hormones, that could cause a change in behavior. But that’d be short-lived, too, since those hormones would quickly break down or be eliminated, and replaced by hormones at your body’s own normal levels.
Your body will continue to make AB+ blood. The O (or any other type–your are a universal donee, so you can receive any other blood type, - or +) will eventually be cleaned out of your system, just like the blood your own body makes.
Also of note, by the way: The donation/recipient rules for plasma are the opposite of those for red blood cells. Anyone can use plasma from an AB+ donor, and an O- patient can receive plasma from any donor. This is part of the reason why, as other posters mentioned, separating out the components can decrease rejection issues.
O- donors are still in more demand, both because the rejection issues from getting the wrong plasma are usually less severe, and because it’s easier to make an artificial substitute for plasma (in many cases, a simple saline solution is good enough, or even just having the patient drink a lot of fluids).
Interesting about blood types in themselves and their discovery. What exactly happens when a transfusion is given of the “wrong” incompatible blood? Is it akin to organ rejection, thinking it’s an invader of sorts? Body attacks itself?
Yes. The white cells in the person who’s received the transfusion attack the transfused cells, so instead of being made stronger by the transfusion, the patient is made weaker (their body is busy fighting the “invasion”).
There was a tragic case in a hospital here where the person responsible for drawing blood for typing took it from the wrong patient. During surgery the patient, who had O-positive blood, received two pints of A-negative blood.
Disseminated intravascular coagulation. Basically, giant blood clots start building up throughout your system. Bad bad news. It happened to a friend of mine and nearly killed her. She was lucky to survive.