Single center experience of therapeutic plasma exchange in a resource-constrained setting: A study of trends in scope and complications

Background

Therapeutic apheresis procedures are becoming an increasingly integral part of modern medical practice, be it as a part of therapy or pre-conditioning regimes for solid organ transplants. In our center, we follow the American Society for Apheresis (ASFA) guidelines for categorizing these procedures. However, lack of a centralized registry for therapeutic apheresis in India, lack of consolidated data as well as a resource-constrained setting prevent it from being utilized to its full potential.

Study Design and Methods

This study was a retrospective analysis of therapeutic plasma exchange (TPE) procedures performed from January 2015 to October 2022 in the Department of Transfusion Medicine at a large tertiary care hospital in North India. All consecutive TPE procedures were included. Overall and specialty-wise scoring for all patients was performed. Mean scores were calculated.

Results

A total of 1434 procedures were performed during the study duration of 7 years. These procedures were performed for 284 different patients. Majority of the procedures were referred from nephrology (895 of 1434, 62.4%), followed by neurology, gastroenterology, and liver transplant teams, hematology, critical care, rheumatology, pediatrics, and internal medicine. Complete response, partial response, and no-response were observed in 1077 (75.1%), 201 (14%), and 156 (10.9%) procedures respectively. Only 14 procedures reported adverse effects.

Discussion

Increasing effectiveness of TPE in a number of procedures and a variety of indications has broadened its scope, while the small number of adverse events, when supervised by trained Transfusion Medicine physicians has made TPE a more viable and safer alternative to other treatment modalities.