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Blood feud: The debate over how long blood lasts

Nature Medicine volume 20, pages 979–981 (2014)Cite this article

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“There's no question that old blood is really abnormal,” says Mark Gladwin, a vascular medicine specialist at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. What's debatable, he says, is whether red blood cells expire sooner than we think.

As a rule of thumb, hospital blood banks in the US hang on to red blood cells for up to 42 days, and by practice, they conserve inventory by dispensing on a first-in, first-out basis. The underlying assumption is that bags of older red blood cells are as effective as fresh ones. But although blood donations are screened for infectious diseases such as HIV and hepatitis, it is impractical to assess each bag of blood to see how many red cells have survived or broken apart in a process called hemolysis. “Every unit of blood is its own lot, so to speak, and you can't test every unit because you would destroy it in the process,” says Richard Weiskopf, an anesthesiologist and emeritus professor at the University of California, San Francisco.

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Change history

  • 22 September 2014

     In the September 2014 issue, the piece “Blood feud: The debate over how long blood lasts” (Nat. Med. 20, 979–982, 2014) stated that proteins in stored blood “can scavenge nitrous oxide” and that “nitrous oxide might tighten blood vessels.” However, the story should have referred to nitric oxide, not nitrous oxide. The error has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of this article.

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  1. Jeanne Erdmann is a health and science writer in Wentzville, Missouri.,

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Erdmann, J. Blood feud: The debate over how long blood lasts. Nat Med 20, 979–981 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nm0914-979

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