INTRODUCTION : The transfusion of blood products in the surgical patient is a measure, often necessary, to guarantee hemodynamic stability and adequate support for the tissues, however, it is not free of risks. Being a measure with a great clinical impact, it has been widely studied in the population of orthopedic, general, cardiac and transplant surgery, however, there is no data in the national literature and there are very few data in the international literature describing the characteristics of the population transfused in non-cardiac emergency surgery. The purpose of this study was to describe the clinical and demographic characteristics of patients subjected to non-cardiac emergency surgery and who were transfused and described as quantity, type of blood product, the time of transfusion and the frequency of complications in the population. METHODS: The present study, takes the database of a clinical study in adult patients, older than 45 years, who underwent urgent non-cardiac surgery between 2010 and 2016, which is currently carried out at the Cardio-Infantil Foundation of Bogotá. (Look at annex 1). Only patients transfused during hospitalization were included. RESULTS: We found that 31.3% (n = 189) of the patients undergoing emergency non-cardiac surgery were transfused at some time during their hospitalization, 52.9% (n = 100) were men, with a median age of 69 years. 79.9% (n = 151) of the transfused population underwent some general surgery procedure and only 20.1% (n = 38) of the patients were taken to orthopedic surgery. The majority of patients are transfused during the postoperative period (55.6% n = 143) while only 22% (n = 57) of the patients were transfused in the preoperative or intraoperative period. It was also found that 91.5% (n = 173) of patients received at least one unit of red blood cells during their hospitalization and 34.3% (n = 65) of patients received plasma, 25.3% (n = 48) patients received platelets and only 10% (n = 19) of the patients were transfused with cryoprecipitate. It was observed that the proportion of patients transfused according to the type of hemocomponent did not change with respect to the period of hospitalization. Finally, it was found that 170 patients transfused with any blood component had bleeding within the complications during their hospital stay. DISCUSION: The incidence of transfusion in the current study was 31.3%, which is higher than that reported for a population with similar characteristics. The blood component most transfused was packed red blood cells, followed by plasma, platelets and cryoprecipitates. The majority of patients received transfusions in the postoperative period and no differences were found between transfusion percentages in the intraoperative and postoperative period. The most frequent complication in the patients was bleeding. More studies are required with another type of design to know the impact of transfusion therapy in patients undergoing emergency non-cardiac surgery.
