Irregular Antibody Positivity in Women Blood Donors with History of Parturition

Oh, Heung Bum; Cho, Youn Jung; Kim, Sang In; Kim, Doo Sung; Han, Kyou Sup

Abstract

BACKGROUND
Antibody screening for donated blood is not yet being performed in Korea. Positive rate of irregular antibodies in Korean patients or blood donors has been thought to be much lower than that of foreign contries. We studied to know the actual frequency of irregular antibodies in blood donors with history of parturition using gel card, which was recently introduced in the field of blood banking and considered to be easy to standardize and sensitive to detect irregular antibodies.
METHODS
706 samples were collected from four blood centers in Seoul for 4 months. Antibody screening and identification were done by two kinds of Gel Card (DiaMed-ID corp, DiaMed, Murten, Switzerland) such as Nacl/Enzyme and LISS/Coombs' card. Adsorption- elution test was done in samples of which we could know the antibody specificity.
RESULTS
Irregular antibodies were identified in 24 cases among 706 samples, therefore the overall frequency was 3.4% (95% CI: 3.4% +/- 1.3%). Only 4 cases, however, showed positive reaction in both enzyme and Coombs' phase, therefore frequency of clinically significant antibodies was 0.57% (95% CI: 0.57% +/- 0.55%). The identified irregular antibodies were anti-Lea (8 cases), Anti-Rh (3 cases) and Anti-P1 (1 case). Adsorption-elution test showed positive reaction only in 3 cases with anti-Rh antibodies.
CONCLUSION
Considering that blood donors with history of parturition comprize just little proportion of total donors in Korea and frequency of irregular antibody is relatively lower than that of foreign countries in same group (0.57% vs 3.8%), it can be concluded that antibody screening be not urgent problem in Korean blood donation program.