I'm very relieved to pass on this post by Irene Irwin to the CLL ACOR list today.
A 30 year study on 1.5 million recipients of blood from 2.1 million individual donors in Denmark and Sweden shows negligible risk of passing on CLL from a donor with MBL/CLL.
medpagetoday.com/Hematology...
"Transmission of monoclonal B-cell lymphocytosis/chronic lymphocytic leukemia (MBL/CLL) does not
contribute importantly to CLL risk among transfusion recipients, retrospective analyses of 30 years
of transfusion data have now indicated.
When donor MBL was approximated by subsequent CLL diagnosis, the entire computerized database from
blood banks in both Denmark and Sweden showed no evidence of CLL clustering among 1.5 million
recipients of blood from 2.1 million individual donors.
"Our analyses provide no evidence that donor MBL/CLL transmission in blood products contributes
significantly to CLL risk among transfusion recipients," Henrik Hjalgrim, MD, of the Statens Serum
Institute, Copenhagen, Denmark, and colleagues reported"
So all members who were blood donors, worry no more that your efforts to help others may have put them at risk of developing CLL.
Blood Abstract
bloodjournal.org/content/ea...
Neil
Photo: One feather short of a galah
Phew! I often wonder about the poor people who got my CLL cell-laden blood (it was at a standard donation that I was told 'you have no haemoglobin, so go to your doctor' that led to my CLL diagnosis). I had hoped that that my CLL cells just went round recipient and then died, so the recipient only had a short-term blip. My thinking went that, as CLL is really a production defect, the recipient would then be free of them (as their production processes were fine)....this news is a relief that I might have been on the right track