July 2011
Sugary or Sugar-free Blood: What’s Your Type?
By Billie Rubin
In an interview with National Public Radio (NPR), Dr. Christine Cserti-Gazdewich, a hematologist at the University of Toronto, educates us on the history of blood types.
"Blood type is a fascinating thing. Most anciently humans, or pre-humans… began as group A. A is the most ancient, so-called wild type. That's what we call genes - the way they start before they begin to mutate and turn into things that exhibit selective survival advantages. So about five million years ago, this mutation pops up called group O. And around that time, and subsequently, group B developed. Group O is actually a non-expression mutation. So A, B and O relate to what kinds of sugars you decorate your cells and secrete into your plasma and other secretions. Your A sugar is something with a messy name called GalNAc or N-Acetylgalactosamine. B is galactose. And it turns out that group O is actually a non-sugar or sugar-free status cell.” You could say it's the Splenda of blood!
Click here to be taken to NPR’s website where you can listen to the complete interview.
Whole Blood & Platelets: What’s the Difference?
By Julie Ruel, Social Media Manager, Stanford Blood Center
At Stanford Blood Center we collect several different types of blood products from our volunteer donors. All products have different functions pre- and post-donation. In other words, before and after they leave your body, they each serve different purposes. For the scope of this article, I’ll focus on red blood cells (RBCs) collected during a whole blood donation and platelets collected during an ABC donation. These are the two most common products we draw, accounting for about 99% of our total donations in a year.
During a whole blood donation, a unit of RBCs is collected. These cells are packed full of hemoglobin and have an important job during their short life inside us (about 120 days). They work diligently around the clock to carry oxygen through arteries to our organs and tissues. Then, via the veins, they return, de-oxygenated, to the heart and lungs.
After we draw the unit, it’s sent to our lab for testing, then shipped off to the local hospitals we serve. RBCs are used, for example, for accident victims and those undergoing surgery and are required for about 70% of all transfusions.
It takes about eight weeks for these iron-rich cells to replenish themselves, which is why donors are required to wait 56 days between donations. Most don’t feel any side effects from the donation, though it does take about 24 hours for the fluid loss to be replaced. Because of this, we ask that donors refrain from strenuous exercise during that period.
Platelets have a different, and still very important function. Because of them, when we bleed, our blood clots. When we draw platelets from donors, they are sent through the same gamut of tests as RBCs, then shipped to the hospitals to use for patients who may not have enough of them to control their bleeding. Patients undergoing treatment for cancer are the primary users of platelets.
Because such a small, insignificant number of RBCs (that, as you remember, carry oxygen to our organs) are lost during a platelet donation, donors feel little, if any, fatigue afterwards. Platelets regenerate quickly and can be donated every 72 hours, up to 24 times in a year.
We welcome all who meet the requirements for donating whole blood to make an appointment at a Center location or blood drive. For example, donors must:
• weigh 110 pounds or more
• be at least 17 years of age (16 with parental consent)
• be feeling well with no symptoms of colds, flu or infection
Platelet donation eligibility is the same as whole blood with a few additional requirements. We screen each donor for the antibody to the cytomegalovirus and typically only draw platelets from those who test negative. In addition, at least one prior whole blood donation must be made at SBC in order to determine eligibility. For more specifics, please visit our website.
Space Shuttles and the Importance of Milestones
By John Williams, Marketing Manager, Stanford Blood Center
Almost daily we hear about a new milestone achieved by someone somewhere. Why are milestones so important? According to Wikipedia, “…a milestone is the end of a stage that marks the completion of a work package or phase, typically marked by a high level event such as completion, endorsement or signing of deliverable.” Perhaps the epitome of this description is the return to Earth of Atlantis, the last space shuttle mission to fly, ending a thirty-year career. On a smaller scale, yet of great importance to patients in need, Stanford Blood Center donors are continuously reaching milestones. To our blood recipients, donating the red stuff trumps trips to the International Space Station.
We are seeing a growing trend of donors celebrating their donation milestones with friends, family, and colleagues. In some case, our donors challenge their friends to donate along with them. For example, dedicated platelet donor, Brian Edwards (seen above), is about to make his 300th donation on August 3 at our Campus location. Brian, a marine geologist and sedimentologist at the USGS in Menlo Park, CA, has been donating with Stanford since 1981. When he is not in the field researching saltwater contaminants or studying Arctic marine habitats, he is donating platelets. He is so excited about this milestone that he has invited 300 friends to donate with him. Brian’s initial motivation for donating blood was a way of giving on behalf of a colleague whose son had leukemia, but after giving for a while, he says “I got hooked on it.” Now he’s trying to get others hooked, too.
Brian is justifiably proud of his accomplishment. Even though he speaks of donating blood as an easy way to give, he sees this exciting milestone as a public service. He says, “I think about the gallon buckets of blood.” And of the donating experience over the years, Brian says, “I feel like family and it’s a joyful reunion every couple of weeks.”
We’ve seen donors celebrate their birthdays and even their retirements by giving blood and inviting their friends to join them.
Can you think of any milestones you’d like to celebrate with us? SBC can help you get the word out to your friends through multiple channels, including Facebook.
Survival Story
By Michele Hyndman, Public Relations Manager, Stanford Blood Center
I met Karen in the fall of 2006 through a new mom’s group at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View where both of our daughters were born. I was immediately drawn to her sense of humor, honesty and authenticity. We shared the joy, frustration and anxiety of new parenthood as we watched our girls grow from newborns to active toddlers. Then we both discovered that we’d be expecting sons to join our families in 2009. In fact Karen, and her daughter Rebecca, were some of the first people to meet my son, Mason, when they brought us dinner that February. Karen’s belly was big that night and we talked about life with two children and everything she still had left to do to prepare for her second child. She still had two months until she was due.
I will never forget how stunned I was when I got an email from Karen on March 5, 2009 to announce her son‘s arrival. It started “Quinn Frederick Bossow was born on Tuesday morning. Unfortunately, he is in extremely critical condition at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital.” I immediately visited the blog she had created to keep family and friends updated on his condition.
In a routine check up, Karen commented that the baby had not been moving as much as before. An ultrasound showed that he was smaller than he should be at 36 weeks and there was a mass in her uterus. The safest course of action was to induce labor. Quinn was born with a massive cancerous tumor on his leg, which was what they had seen in the ultrasound.
Karen wrote, “A team of neonatologists was waiting for him. He was whisked away to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) where they worked to prevent him from bleeding to death. They told us he would need surgery right away and prepared to transfer him from El Camino Hospital to Stanford. Right now, they have controlled the bleeding in his leg. They can’t remove any of the tissue until he is stronger and there is a good chance they will have to amputate much of the leg because the tissue is so fused with his own that they can’t separate it without him bleeding to death.”
In that first post, she ended “Also, consider donating blood to your nearest blood bank. Our little boy sure is going through a lot of it, so it makes me appreciate the importance of donating blood.”
My heart ached for Karen and her husband, Garth. What they were going through was unimaginable. On March 13, Quinn’s left leg was amputated just above the knee. In addition, Quinn had several abnormal electroencephalograms (EEG), a test that measures and records the electrical activity of your brain. Doctors were uncertain if he had brain trauma.
Quinn’s recovery is nothing short of miraculous. He was tenacious. After the amputation, Quinn grew stronger. He ate and slept well. On March 27, 2009, Karen and Garth were able to bring Quinn home. Since then, he continued to exceed every expectation. Quinn shows no sign of cancer now but doctors continue to monitor him closely. He learned to roll over and crawl on his own quickly. Quinn is now learning to walk with a prosthetic leg using a push toy. Karen says he has no idea he has any limitations. He is an extremely happy, joyful little boy with fiery red hair. He is a force of nature.
A heartfelt microdocumentary about Quinn and his family:
A Magic Potion
By Billie Rubin, Hemoglobin’s Catabolic Cousin, reporting from the labs of Stanford Blood Center
Cryoprecipitate is a blood product made from frozen plasma. The plasma is slowly thawed, then sent through a centrifuge, a machine that spins and sorts blood components based on their masses. The “cold precipitate” protein that is left behind after most of the liquid plasma is removed is the cryoprecipitate.
Cryoprecipitate, or “cryo” as it is affectionately called, originally found use as treatment for hemophilia. It was discovered that cryo had concentrated quantities of Factor VIII, a blood-clotting factor. These concentrates are transfused in pools of five or six. (Coincidentally, this discovery is in part due to Dr. Judith Pool, a Stanford researcher and professor in the 1960s and 70s.)
Before cryo, hemophiliacs had to be transfused with frozen plasma to help control their bleeding. However, all of the extra fluid in the frozen plasma could lead to circulatory overload and congestive heart failure. So, this magic potion revolutionized the treatment of hemophiliacs!
In the Family
By Deanna Bolio, Public Relations Associate, Stanford Blood Center
Fifteen-year-old Maya Israni has been around blood drives since she was no taller than the Canteen table. Today, Maya is the youngest blood drive coordinator for a community blood drive. Maya was six when her mother, Sonoo, hosted the first blood drive at Ladera Recreation District, which she did in response to the September 11, 2001 tragedy.
“I called the Blood Center and asked if I could help in some way and they told me they were always looking for people to create blood drives,” Sonoo said (pictured above with daughter Maya). “I did one in the spring to honor my mother’s birth and one in the fall to honor my father’s.”
The twice-annual blood drives became a staple, with Maya and her older sister, Ellora, doing what they could to support the drive, including helping with publicity and calling neighbors.
“I was brought up with an ethos that said ‘with privilege comes responsibility’ and responsibility goes beyond writing checks,” Sonoo said. “I’ve been a volunteer for most of my life and from the time they were little, I’ve had them volunteer with different things.”
When Sonoo’s eldest was a teen, she asked if she could take charge of the blood drive and her mother agreed. Maya took over the reins last year when her older sister went off to college. She credits both her mother and her sister for leaving her a great base.
“They both really helped me and built me into it,” Maya said. “They built a really great foundation for me, like this great list of 70 or 80 people that I can always call up. That has been the most helpful.”
“What stands out about Maya is how organized she is. She’s even two or three weeks in front of me at times,” said Elisa Manzanares, Stanford Blood Center Account Manager. “She’s also very gracious.”
Organization is key since Maya balances her coordinator duties with a host of other activities, including school athletics, music, a part-time job and volunteer work.
“I think she uses the same skills for the blood drive that she used to be the top salesperson in selling cookies as a Girl Scout,” Sonoo said. “She’s comfortable reaching out to people.”
The Isranis attribute some of the success of their blood drive to the support of their tight-knit community.
“For the community, the blood drive has become a place where people can come and gather twice a year, “ said Sonoo. “They come early and they stay late talking in the Canteen.”
This October, Maya will bring the community together once again for the 20th Ladera Recreation District blood drive.
For information on becoming a blood drive coordinator, please visit our website.
The Life of a Red Blood Cell
By Billie Rubin, Hemoglobin’s Catabolic Cousin, reporting from the labs of Stanford Blood Center
Red blood cells (RBCs) are born in the bone marrow of our large bones at a rate of 2 million every second! Our bone marrow is like a heavy-duty erythropoietic ward.
And RBCs grow up fast. In about seven days they are ready to toss out their nucleus and DNA and leave the nest to spend all of their 120-day life span traveling down vast arterial highways and capillary byways. They get rid of their interior baggage so they can each carry over 250 million molecules of hemoglobin. While tossing out their DNA makes them beefier, it also limits them as they can't reproduce or even repair themselves. It's a wild life.
Congenital CMV: A Family's Journey
By Julie Ruel, Social Media Manager, Stanford Blood Center
Cytomegalovirus (CMV) is not an unfamiliar term in the blood banking world. A member of the herpes family, it is one of the many tests we perform on each unit of donated blood. For healthy individuals, having the virus, or what we refer to as being CMV positive, isn’t harmful. And if healthy, unless you’ve specifically been tested for CMV, you most likely don’t know whether you have the antibody to it or not. However, for infants or those with impaired immune systems, it can be deadly. Because of this, Stanford Blood Center routinely tests for it and was in fact, the first blood center in the world to provide CMV negative blood to hospitals for immunocompromised transfusion recipients.
About 50 percent of us will have contracted the virus by the time we reach adult age. What I’ll be sharing here, though, is the story of a family whose twin girls developed the virus congenitally, leaving them severely disabled.
Janelle Greenlee and her husband, Eddy, found out seven weeks into her second pregnancy that they were having twins. Although thrilled, they wondered how in the world they would be able to handle a toddler plus twin infants! These ultrasound results classified her pregnancy as high-risk. But what they found out weeks later seemed to be a serious cause for concern. Abnormalities of the brain were found on one of the twins and it was recommended that they terminate the pregnancy. Opting to continue on, Janelle was soon after put on bed rest for the remainder of her pregnancy.
Rachel and Riley were born on August 8, 2003, crying and breathing on their own. Nonetheless, they were taken to the NICU where some observations and tests were done. Janelle recalls the devastating information they were given about Rachel. “Her MRI showed severe brain damage and a virus called CMV was suspected as the cause. We were told by the neonatologist that there was a 90 percent chance that Rachel would be severely mentally compromised or die. We were destroyed and came to learn that we knew nothing about this new word that was about to rule our life.” Rachel was diagnosed with congenital CMV, which, unknown to Janelle, she herself had contracted early in her pregnancy. The effects of this virus on the little girl include microcephaly (small head and brain), cerebral palsy, deafness, impaired vision, and seizure disorder. They were devastated to find out that Riley also tested positive for CMV. Her condition is less severe but, like Rachel, she also suffers from deafness and cerebral palsy.
Above, Eddy and his two girls enjoying some time together.
Congenital CMV is a condition that affects 1 in 150 babies yet tests for it are not routinely done during pregnancy. It can be transferred to an unborn child only if the mother is infected during pregnancy and it is more likely to cause defects if infection happens during the early term. Some simple precautions to take if pregnant include washing hands often, avoiding sharing food and utensils with babies and children, and avoiding contact with saliva when kissing babies and children on the face.
Eddy can lightly joke about having a PhD on the subject that just years ago he had never heard of. And Janelle has since started a non-profit organization, Stop CMV, to raise awareness of the virus. Together, they have raised two special girls (in addition to their two sons) who will turn eight next month, have many, many friends, and are quite popular in their community! Perhaps it was the pact they made shortly after the girls were born that has given them the strength they needed to persevere. “Our family decided that our main concern was to give the twins everything that we could for however long we may have them and to love them for whatever and whoever they are, not what they aren’t.”
Please click here to read more about Riley and Rachel’s story.
The Ball is in Your Court
By John Williams, Marketing Manager, Stanford Blood Center
It’s Wimbledon time and the games are in full swing. It takes many years of dedication to become a professional tennis player and the current top seeds at Wimbledon have devoted their lives to the sport. Donating blood also takes dedication, and we have many loyal donors who have made saving lives their lifetime routine. Come to think of it, tennis and blood donation have a lot more in common, too.
Perhaps you drive to the Blood Center for a nice mini break from work. You’re set to beat or at least match last year’s donation record by upping your own game and earning extra points. After your donation they serve you delicious chocolate chip cookies, perhaps even let you have a second serving. Of course these slices of delectable morsels are the Blood Center’s fancy footwork in seeding your return – the ace up their sleeve.
Your kind donation is of great advantage to the receiver. So rally your friends and show some love!
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