Transfusions of suspensions of blood platelets in thrombocytopenia and thrombopathia.

some investigators have used blood very rich in blood platelets, namely, blood of patients suffering from polycythaemia (Stefanini, Chatterjea, Dameshek, Zannos, and Perez Santiago, 1952). The possibility of treating thrombocytopenia by means of suspensions of thrombocytes has been considered (Dillard, Brecher, and Cronkite, 1951 ; Juillard, Maupin, Loverdo, Bernard, Colvez, and Lecomte, 1952; Minor and Burnett, 1952), but the majority were of the opinion that thrombocytes outside their natural medium of plasma are too unstable. The results obtained with transfusions of normal blood are generally unsatisfactory. One of the explanations of this fact is that the treatment of the blood before the transfusion does not usually guarantee that the thrombocytes are not destroyed before the transfusion or that their functions remain more or less normal. The technique with silicone (Jaques, Fidlar, Felsted, and Macdonald, 1946) theoretically overcomes part of these difficulties. but with this technique the objection remains that too large a quantity of normal blood is necessary to influence an existing thrombocytopenia adequately. The use of blood of patients with polycythaemia, of which good results have been communicated recently, has the great drawback that these patients are few. We have examined the effect of the intravenous injection of concentrated suspensions of platelets in different conditions of thrombocytopenia and also in some cases of thrombopathia. In preparing platelet suspensions we have used a centrifugation and resuspension technique rather different from that used earlier by other authors (Copley and Houlihan, 1947; Ware, Fahey, and Seegers, 1948; Zucker, 1951).