Doctors Do A Blood Transfusion For The Involvement Of Patients In Trials Of New Cancer Drugs

Doctors Do A Blood Transfusion For The Involvement Of Patients In Trials Of New Cancer Drugs.
Canadian researchers rephrase they've noticed a worrying trend: Cancer doctors ordering superfluous blood transfusions so that critically ill patients can qualify for drug trials. In a letter published recently in the New England Journal of Medicine, the researchers surface on three cases during the last year in Toronto hospitals in which physicians ordered blood transfusions that could pass the patients appear healthier for the lone purpose of getting them into clinical trials for chemotherapy drugs. The practice raises both medical and right concerns, the authors say.

And "On the physician side, you want to do the best for your patients," said co-author Dr Jeannie Callum, principal of transfusion medicine and tissue banks at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto. "If these patients have no other options communist to them, you want to do everything you can to get them into a clinical trial. But the dogged is put in a horrible position, which is, 'If you want in to the trial, you have to have the transfusion.' But the transfusion only carries risks to them".

A solely serious complication of blood transfusions is transfusion-related severe lung injury, which occurs in about one in 5000 transfusions and usually requires the patient to go on life support, said Callum. But barring the potential for physical harm, enrolling very sick common man in a clinical trial can also skew the study's results - making the drug perform worse than it might in patients whose plague was not as far along.

The unnecessary transfusions were discovered by the Toronto Transfusion Collaboration, a consortium of six urban area hospitals formed to carefully review all transfusions as a means of improving patient safety. At this point, it's ridiculous to know how often transfusions are ordered just to get patients into clinical trials. When she contacted colleagues around the humankind to find out if the practice is widespread, all replied that they didn't sift the reasons for ordering blood transfusions and so would have no way of knowing.