By Jessica Clement [1]
BELLEVILLE – A prick of the finger could be your first step toward saving lives.
Those few drops of blood taken when you attend a blood-typing session available in your community are enough to determine your own blood type.
QNet News decided to explore the importance of knowing your blood type when Canadian Blood Services [2] set up shop for one of those sessions at Loyalist College this week. We asked a second-year nursing student, Karley Doucette, why people should find out what their blood type is.
“There’s a lot of benefits for both the individual and their community,” Doucette said. “Hospitals will send out a notice that they are in need (of) blood, and sometimes this call is specifically for a certain blood type.”
Knowing your blood type can help you make a decision on when is the best time for you to donate, if you aren’t a regular donor. People with O-negative blood are considered “universal donors” because their type can be given to any recipient. However, only people with O-negative blood can receive O-negative in return, forcing hospitals to rely on frequent donations from these donors.
But, Doucette said, “hospitals need donors of all types. It’s a matter of life or death for some patients. Knowing your type is a great first step to helping someone in your city.”
An average transfusion requires three pints of blood, and ensuring it is a match is crucial.
“There’s a lot of things that can happen if it’s not. It can throw your body’s entire hemodynamics [3] off, and it can also clot, which can be fatal for the patient,” Doucette said.
Doctors and health-care staff take extreme precautions to ensure they are giving patients proper blood matches, she said. “Incompatible blood will affect your whole vascular system. Your red blood cells could essentially destroy themselves, so blood transfusions are taken very seriously in hospitals.”
Knowing your type can also give you a warning about whether you’re at increased risk for certain heart diseases and cancers. According to a study [4] published in 2015, people with non-O blood types have a higher rate of mortality associated with cardiovascular diseases. Knowing you’re at an increased risk is one step closer to prevention.
The ABO grouping system is not the only way blood types are categorized; there is also the Rh blood group [5] system. Doucette said that complications can occur due to incompatible Rh levels during pregnancy. Put simply, if an Rh-negative mother’s blood mixes with her Rh-positive baby’s blood, it can trigger something called Rh-sensitization, which can be fatal to babies of future pregnancies.
“This was actually an issue during my own mom’s pregnancies,” Doucette said. “My mom is a B-negative, meaning she can only receive the Rh-negative (blood), which I am as well. But if I had had a different blood type, her body could have rejected me, or vice-versa, because the bloods would have been incompatible and all those adverse effects we talked about before could have happened.”
To avoid this risk, doctors check a woman’s blood type early in her pregnancy and mothers get an immunoglobulin shot that prevents Rh-sensitization.