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BACKGROUND: Platelet dysfunction due to antiplatelet therapy contributes to perioperative bleeding. Several trials investigating the influence of aspirin intake within the 5 days before surgery reported that transfusion requirements were either increased or not significantly affected by aspirin intake. Our objective was to compare the assessment of aspirin intake by patient self-reporting and by measurement of platelet function with regard to transfusion requirements.

METHODS: In a prospective trial, a standardized questionnaire was used in 100 patients for aspirin intake within the 5 days immediately before coronary artery bypass grafting. Whole blood platelet aggregation triggered by arachidonic acid was investigated using the Multiplate® platelet function analyzer.

RESULTS: Eleven of 23 patients with aspirin intake within the 5 days before the intervention showed an abnormal aggregation response. Nine of 77 patients who reported no aspirin intake before surgery had an abnormal aggregation response. There were no significant differences in chest tube drainage and red blood cell transfusion over the first 24 h postoperatively between patients with and without reported aspirin intake. There was no significant difference in chest tube drainage over the first 24 h postoperatively between patients showing normal or abnormal aggregation response. Patients with abnormal aggregation before intervention (<51 U) received significantly more platelet transfusion than patients with normal aggregation (1.1 U compared to 0.3 U, P = 0.001).

CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that arachidonic acid-induced aggregation in whole blood may be a better predictor of platelet-related coagulopathy and platelet transfusion than the assessment of aspirin intake by patient self-reporting.

The Quirks & Quarks Guide to Space "42 Questions (and Answers) About Life, the Universe, and Everything"
Written by Jim Lebans
Introduction by Bob McDonald

For everyone who’s curious about what’s new under (and over and around) the stars.

Douglas Adams famously pronounced in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that the answer to life, the universe, and everything was 42. Quirks & Quarks, whose approach to science owes almost as much to Adams as it does to Newton or Einstein or Hawking, have flipped that notion through a gap in the space-time continuum (or something like that) and come up with answers to the 42 essential questions about space.

Much about the universe is very hard for most of us to grasp, and if anyone can explain these mind-bending aspects of the heavens above, it’s the Quirks & Quarks producers, who have been bringing Canadians understandable science, with trademark humour, for more than thirty years. In their Guide to Space, they answer such pressing questions as Where does space begin? Why is most of the universe missing? Is there intelligent life in the universe? And the real puzzler: What came before the Big Bang? They also answer questions we wish we’d thought to ask, such as Can you surf a gravity wave? and Why is the universe’s temperature on my TV? There are answers as well to far more practical questions, like What happens when you fall into a black hole? and How will the universe end? The answers, which have been vetted by a team of astronomers, are witty, authoritative, in-depth, accurate, up-to-date astronomically, and, of course, quirky.


From the Trade Paperback edition.