How do I analyze the role of red blood cell transfusions on clinical outcome in anemic patients? Disentangling the effect of red blood cell transfusions from pre‐operative anemia on post‐operative outcome

Preoperative anemia is associated with worse clinical postoperative outcomes and a higher risk of receiving red blood cell (RBC) transfusions. It is challenging to disentangle the effect of preoperative anemia from the effect of receiving RBC transfusions on postoperative clinical outcomes such as length of hospital stay (LOS). When analyzing the association of preoperative anemia on LOS, it is important to be able to analyze RBC transfusions as a mediator in this relationship. In this paper, the background and application of mediation analysis is outlined as a statistical methodology in transfusion medicine research.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Transfusion

• Publication date

  2025-04-03

• Fields of study

  Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1111/trf.18224PMID 40181651PMCID 12088315
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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