“If you take these 86 patients who had cell salvage intraoperatively, 14 of them ultimately required donor blood, and that amounted to 23 units, giving kind of a lower limit for the potential benefit of cell salvage in this patient cohort,” he said.
Abdominal myomectomy often has a high rate of blood loss, with about a 10%-20% rate of transfusion. While the technique of cell salvage is widely used in other fields, it hasn’t been fully investigated in the context of gynecologic surgery, he said, explaining the rationale for the study.
Subjects included were women aged 18-60 years who underwent abdominal myomectomy for benign indications at the Cleveland Clinic during 2011-2016. Those with current malignancy or with surgery performed by a gynecologic oncologist were excluded.
The non–cell salvage and cell salvage groups were comparable with respect to age, body mass index, ethnicity, and preoperative and postoperative hemoglobin.