Depletion of Nitric Oxide in Bank Blood Spells Trouble

It has been long known that people who receive blood transfusions have a higher chance of having all kinds of medical problems following the transfusion. Research coming out of Duke now shows that stored blood loses a great deal of its nitric oxide content which is critical in oxygen transfer from blood to tissues.

Almost immediately after it is donated, human blood begins to lose a key gas that opens up blood vessels to facilitate the transfer of oxygen from red blood cells to oxygen-starved tissues.
Thus, millions of patients are apparently receiving transfusions with blood that is impaired in its ability to deliver oxygen, according to Duke University Medical Center researchers, who reported the results of their studies in two separate papers appearing early on-line in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
They also found that adding this gas back to stored blood before transfusion appears to restore red blood cells’ ability to transfer oxygen to tissues. These studies go a long way toward answering a major problem which many physicians are beginning to appreciate – blood transfusions with banked human blood may do more harm than good for a majority of patients, according to the researchers.
Over the past five years, many studies, including some performed at Duke, have demonstrated that patients who receive blood transfusions have higher incidences of heart attack, heart failure, stroke and even death. While it is known that the banked blood is not the same as blood in the body, the reasons behind blood’s association with worse outcomes have not been well-understood.
The key to the current findings is that nitric oxide in red blood cells is crucial to the delivery of oxygen to tissues. Nitric oxide keeps the blood vessels open. The new studies demonstrated that nitric oxide in red blood cells begins breaking down almost immediately after red blood cells leave the body.
“It doesn’t matter how much oxygen is being carried by red blood cells, it cannot get to the tissues that need it without nitric oxide,” said Duke’s Jonathan Stamler, M.D., senior author of one of the PNAS papers, whose group originally discovered the role of red blood cell nitric oxide in oxygen delivery. “Nitric oxide opens up the tiny blood vessels, allowing red blood cells to pass and deliver oxygen. If the blood vessels cannot open, the red blood cells back up in the vessel and tissues go without oxygen. The result can be a heart attack or even death.
“The issue of transfused blood being potentially harmful to patients is one of the biggest problems facing American medicine,” continued Stamler, who is a professor of cardiovascular and pulmonary medicine. “Most people do not appreciate that blood has the intrinsic capacity to open blood vessels, thereby enabling oxygen to get to tissues. Banked blood cannot do this properly.”

Dr. Stamler explains the findings in this video released by Duke Med: