CHAPTER ONE

1.0     INTRODUCTION 

Transfusion of blood products is often required with the aim of improving the blood counts and clinical condition of the patients. However, transfusion can lead to serious adverse effects including infectious and non-infectious complications. With the improvements in donor screening and infectious diseases testing, the risk of infectious complications has declined in the past few decades. But the risks of non- infectious complications have become more apparent. These non- infectious complications can occur rapidly after transfusion (acute) or many days and/ or weeks after transfusion (delayed).1 Acute transfusion reactions (ATRs) occur within 24 hours of administration of transfusion and most of them occurs within the first four hours. Commonly encountered ATRs include acute haemolytic reaction, febrile non-haemolytic reaction, allergic reaction, volume overload, bacterial contamination and isolated hypotension.2 These ATRs have different etiology, clinical presentation and severity. However, most of these reactions are usually mild and transient. The frequency of ATRs is estimated to be 0.2% to 10%2-4 and are responsible for death in approximately 1 per 250,000.Haemovigilance consists of reporting of all the complications related to transfusion so that these can be avoided in the future. Various haemovigilanceprogrammmes have been developed and implemented in several countries including Canada, United Kingdom and France; and they publish their annual reports of adverse events associated with blood transfusion.4-The aim of these programmmes is to have a system of surveillance and thus lower the risks associated with transfusion. Unfortunately, there is no such programmme inOwerri Municipal and the reporting of transfusion hazards is not mandatory. Also there is under reporting by the medical staff and thus most of the minor adverse events do not come to attention and therefore the exact incidence of various types of transfusion reactions is not known. Keeping this in mind, the primary objective of the study was to determine the frequency and type of ATRs occurring in hospitalized patients who required transfusion at a tertiary care center in In Owerri Municipal.

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