Approximately 1.4 million donations of blood are given to provide life-saving treatment to ~700,000 NHS patients annually. Transfusion is essential for many groups of patients, including those who cannot make healthy haemoglobin (e.g., sickle cell disorder and thalassemia).
Molecules on the surface of red blood cells are known as blood groups and these are determined genetically. Current practice is to match blood for transfusion to patients’ major blood groups, ABO and D. However, there are many more blood groups for which donor blood is not routinely matched with the patient’s types. These minor blood groups are usually not matched partly as the current testing method is expensive and not able to test all these groups. These mismatches can on occasion cause life-threatening reactions, particularly in patients who require frequent transfusions of donor blood.
The risk for these severe reactions can be reduced by introducing a new DNA matching test, which will soon become available for NHS patients. We seek access to the DNA genotyping results of NIHR BioResource participants to determine how the introduction of this new test will bring benefits to NHS patients who require regular transfusions.
