Cancer therapy sends blood demand soaring
An urgent call was made today for more people to become life-saving platelet donors as demand has soared with the number of patients undergoing chemotherapy.
The Irish Blood Transfusion Service and the Irish Cancer Society (ICS) revealed the need for the component of blood has increased by 50% over the past five years, mainly due to the number of new cases of cancer.
More than 22,000 donations of platelets are needed a year to meet the demand. The transfusion service delivers around 90 units of platelets a day, or 500 a week, to Irish hospitals, with 90% of these used in the treatment of cancer patients.
At the launch of the life-saving platelet donation awareness campaign, Dr William Murphy, national medical director of the IBTS, said platelets are an essential part of blood, enabling it to clot properly.
The service collects platelets in two ways.
The first is by pooling, which involves processing platelets from whole blood donations. It takes four whole donations to produce one dose of platelets for patients.
The second method is aphaeresis, which is a special type of donation where the platelets are separated from the rest of the blood during donation.
He said an aphaeresis donation collects the same amount of platelets as those pooled from eight to 12 whole blood donations.
“The IBTS is endeavouring to limit patients’ exposure to many donors; therefore collecting platelets through aphaeresis is preferable to provide the safest possible product for the patient,” said Dr Murphy.
“The shelf-life of pooled platelets is also only five days and the shelf-life of aphaeresis platelets can be extended from five to seven days.
“At present, only approximately 40% of platelets supplied to Irish hospitals are collected by aphaeresis and it is the aim of the IBTS in association with the Irish Cancer Society to recruit about 2,000 new platelet donors in order to supply 100% aphaeresis platelets within the next three years. We urge the general public to seriously consider signing up as platelet donors.”
Both the transfusion service and the ICS called for more donors and more donations to be made through aphaeresis.
The transfusion service said chemotherapy often damages the patients’ bone marrow cells where platelets are made and make the patients prone to spontaneous bleeding.
A leukaemia patient undergoing chemotherapy may need between four and 10 platelet transfusions per week. Someone undergoing a bone marrow transplant may need up to 60 units of platelets. Around 373 new cases of leukaemia are diagnosed every year.
Morgan Hackett, 44, from Dublin, was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 2000 and subsequently diagnosed with leukaemia in 2005.
He said: “My leukaemia treatment experience put previous treatments for non-Hodgkin's in the shade. They normally involved five hourly treatments every month during which my white and red blood cell counts and my platelets and neutraphil counts went to zero.
“I could not have committed to my chemotherapy without the blood products including platelets being available. I simply would not have survived.
“I just lay there feeling better when receiving the platelets and feeling worse as my own blood factory could not yet do the job so I received more platelets as required.”
