Transfusion in trauma: empiric or guided therapy?

Abstract

A state of the art lecture titled “Transfusion therapy in trauma—what to give? Empiric vs guided” was presented at the International Society on Thrombosis and Haemostasis Congress in 2024. Uncontrolled bleeding is the commonest preventable cause of death after traumatic injury. Hemostatic resuscitation is the foundation of contemporary transfusion practice for traumatic bleeding and has 2 main aims: to immediately support the circulating blood volume and to treat/prevent the associated trauma-induced coagulopathy. There are 2 broad types of hemostatic resuscitation strategy: empiric ratio-based therapy, often using red blood cells and fresh frozen plasma in a 1:1 ratio, and targeted therapy where the use of platelets, plasma, or fibrinogen is guided by laboratory or viscoelastic hemostatic tests. There are benefits, and limitations, to each strategy and neither approach has yet been shown to improve outcomes across all patient groups. Questions remain, and future directions for improving transfusion therapy are likely to require novel approaches that have greater flexibility to evaluate and treat heterogeneous trauma cohorts. Such approaches may include the integration of machine learning technologies in clinical systems, with real-time linkage of clinical and laboratory data, to aid early recognition of patients at the greatest risk of bleeding and to direct and individualize transfusion therapies. Greater mechanistic understanding of the underlying pathobiology of trauma-induced coagulopathy and the direct effects of common treatments on this process will be of equal importance to the development of new treatments. Finally, we summarize relevant new data on this topic presented at the 2024 ISTH Congress.