Pulmonary Complications of Sickle Cell Disease

Abstract

The 1127 enrollees included 179 patients who had not received a transfusion and were followed in a registry. Since cholecystectomy was the most common surgery, it was used to compare the effects of transfusion with no transfusion on complication rates.1 A total of 38% of the group of patients who had not received a transfusion had an acute sickle cell complication as compared with 12% of the aggressive-transfusion group and 18% of the conservative-transfusion group.