Red blood cell transfusion in adult palliative care: a systematic review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The risks and benefits of red blood cell (RBC) transfusion in palliative care patients remain poorly understood. We reviewed the literature to summarize available information on RBC transfusion in this population. STUDY DESIGN AND METHODS: We searched electronic databases (MEDLINE, Embase, PsycINFO, CINAHL) from inception through September 2016 to identify studies reporting data on palliative patients receiving RBC transfusion. Original studies that assessed RBC transfusion as an intervention and reported at least one clinical outcome were included. Study characteristics, results on transfusion-related outcomes, and authors' conclusions on the value of transfusion in palliative patients were abstracted and reported. RESULTS: We identified 1839 studies, of which 137 were selected for data extraction and 13 were included (11 case series, one prospective cohort, and one retrospective cohort). Nine studies addressed symptom relief following transfusion using subjective symptom scales, of which eight (89%) indicated some degree of short-term benefit and one study (11%) showed no benefit. Posttransfusion survival was reported in four studies-one demonstrated prolonged survival in patients receiving RBC transfusion; three had no comparison group. Other outcomes reported included hemoglobin values posttransfusion in four studies and adverse events following transfusion in three studies. CONCLUSIONS: In palliative care, RBC transfusion may provide symptom relief and improve subjective well-being, though the duration and magnitude of this effect, and transfusion-associated risks specific to this population remain unclear. Currently, no high quality evidence exists to support or guide the use of RBC transfusion in this population. Moreover, the clinical heterogeneity within the palliative population limits the interpretation of most studies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".