Transfusionsgrenzen – Restrictive Liberal Transfusion Thresholds: When should extremely preterm infants receive blood transfusions?

Transfusions are frequently administered to extremely preterm infants and 50–80% of these infants will receive multiple transfusions during their initial hospitalization. Despite being a universally accepted part of the treatment of preterm infants, RBCT practices vary greatly between neonatal units in the absence of uniformly accepted physiologic or evidence-based transfusion criteria. The short-term effects of transfusion on outcome measures such as apnea, weight gain, heart rate, and oxygen consumption have been studied in a few small randomized, mostly uncontrolled trials and several observational studies wi…