Fresh blood or old blood? How shall we manage the inventories?

摘要

The morphologic and functional changes that red blood cells (RBCs) undergo as they age, both during in vivo circulation and during refrigerated storage in nutrient anticoagulant solutions, have been recognized for a long time. Studies in the 1940s and 1950s, for example, showed that older cells lose their biconcave disc shape1 and their enzyme activity, particularly in glycolytic pathways, is reduced.