Dear Sir, In pediatric transfusion, small quantities of Packed Red Blood Cells (PRBC) are often employed for single transfusion. Typically perinatal transfusion for pre-term neonates requires multiple PRBC concentrates, both to compensate for anemia and the aliquots of blood used for frequent laboratory tests. To limit the risks connected to allogeneic blood, single donors are usually used. From their wholeblood donations, aliquots of RBCs are progressively separated, crossmatched and transfused. A number of techniques (1-3) have been proposed but there is no consensus on the best technique to be used to avoid bacterial contamination of the product or damage to RBCs due to repeated centrifugations of the residual blood when a further aliquot of blood is prepared. Moreover, after pediatric transfusion, when several aliquots have been used, it is not uncommon that some RBCs remaining in the primary bag are discarded since the residual unit may not satisfy the necessary standards. Recently, we developed a method for collecting platelets along with aliquots of RBCs (4) using the DFC MCS 3p cell separator (Haemonetics, Nyon, Switzerland). The collection methodology does not affect the quality of platelets and RBCs and makes tailoring the amount of RBCs to be collected on the basis of the donor's weight very easy. According to the donor's body weight from 6 to 10 aliquots of RBCs (and platelets) can be collected for adequate storage. The basic technique has been slightly modified to collect PRBC aliquots for pediatric use starting from the usual SDPPRBC (Single Donor Platelet Packed Red Blood Cells) protocol. With the new protocol, RBCs were collected in aliquots of 30-50 ml at the end of each pass, after platelet collection had taken place. After RBC collection, from 80 to 120 ml of SAGM was automatically sent into the primary RBC bag (Fig. 1). Blood was anticoagulated 1:12 with acid CPD (sodium citrate 22g, citric acid 11 g, glucose 50g, sodium phosphate 3.76g, distilled water 1000ml Parkfields Sterile Supply Unit Pond Lane Wolverhampton, UK). The RBCs in the primary bag, were left undisturbed for 8-20 hours, on-line filtered with a BioR01 Plus filter (Biofil Mirandola, Italy) stored in the secondary RBC bag (Fig. 1/D) or divided into aliquots in the storage bags (Fig. 1/E) for subsequent use. To validate the RBC products prepared according to this technique we studied 20 procedures carried out on 20 male donors with a body weight exceeding 80 kg in order to collect more than 300g of PRBCs. The appropriate consent was obtained both for the procedure and the study. The donors' body weight averaged 86.9 kg (range 80-103), the average platelet precount was 262 ± 34 x 1OE3uLand all the donors underwent 8 passes with both platelet and RBC (38g) collection at each pass. The PC volume was 308 ± 46 ml and the platelet yield was 4.73 ± 1.3 x 10E11. The WBC contamination was 1.3 ± 0.3 x 10E7, while the PRBC product was 304g (+120 ml SAG-
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