Assessment of haemostasis in platelet transfusion clinical trials with differential follow-up

摘要

Sherman and Corash [1] maintain that the results of the randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that compared the odds of bleeding complications in recipients of pathogen-reduced vs. non-pathogen-reduced platelets must not be integrated, because the available studies had used different periods of observation. Their reasoning is that 'if patients are observed for a longer period of time [in one RCT vs. another], then it is more likely that a bleeding event will be observed; conversely, if the observation time is shorter, a bleeding event is less likely to be observed' [1].