Desmopressin for minimising perioperative allogeneic blood transfusion.

What It Covers

The paper reports a study of Deamino Arginine Vasopressin, published as a systematic review.

Public concerns regarding the safety of transfused blood have prompted re-consideration of the use of allogeneic (from an unrelated donor) red blood cell (RBC) transfusion, and a range of techniques designed to minimise transfusion requirements.

Articles were identified by: computer searches of OVID MEDLINE, EMBASE, and Current Contents (to August 2000) and web sites of international health technology assessment agencies (to May 1998).

Who the Included Studies Covered

The age groups tagged for this paper are adults.

Randomised controlled parallel group trials in which adult patients, scheduled for non-urgent surgery, were randomised to DDAVP, or to a control group, who did not receive the intervention.

Trial quality was assessed using criteria proposed by Schulz et al.

What Was Measured

Articles were identified by: computer searches of OVID MEDLINE, EMBASE, and Current Contents (to August 2000) and web sites of international health technology assessment agencies (to May 1998).

The principal outcomes were: the number of patients exposed to red cells, and the amount of blood transfused.

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Blood Loss, Surgical, Deamino Arginine Vasopressin, Erythrocyte Transfusion, Hemostatics, Randomized Controlled Trials as Topic and Transplantation, Homologous.

What This Means in Plain Language

This is a systematic review of Deamino Arginine Vasopressin.

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 7 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2001 (The Cochrane database of systematic reviews), a journal based in England.

More context: all human trials.