Blood Donations in the Elderly
This weekend I’m joining my wife for an academic retreat in rural Wisconsin. The topic is geriatric medicine and training of rising chief residents in all specialties how to incorporate geriatric medicine into their curricula. While I was stumped at first how incorporating care of older adults could fit in to my Pathology practice, I was inspired by the keynote speaker here. Previously an executive at a prominent life insurance business, he spoke about healthy aging and how our perspectives in medicine, especially those in a tertiary care center, can be warped. We lose sight of the healthy older adults and forget that there are so many out there aging well!
As the speaker also reminded us, aging is a process and NOT a disease. Since I’ve been on the clinical pathology rotations of late, that made me curious: are older adults active in donating blood? While I don’t know the specific demographic breakdown of blood donations by age, I know a fair number of older adults do donate regularly. On the other hand, I feel there needs to be more awareness of the eligibility of older adults in blood donations. They form a large population from which to draw and form our blood supply.
The Red Cross has no upper age limit in their eligibility criteria – you need only be “well and with no restrictions or limitations to your activities”. Other blood centers such as mine in Milwaukee have similar guidelines – be “in good health on the day of donation”. Because these are open for some interpretation, others may impose a 65 or 75 year age limit. I would argue after a quick literature search that there isn’t much evidence out there to support placing age limits and that more research needs to be done. With more and more of our population growing into the older age groups, “older” is becoming “younger” and we shouldn’t ignore this source of volunteers.
Sources:
Red Cross Website
Blood Center of Wisconsin Donor Eligibility
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