AHMEDABAD: A 65-year-old man from Rajkot was taken by surprise when he could not find blood matching his blood group for cardiac surgery in 2020. The surprise grew even more because his known blood group was ab positiveUniversal acceptor. His long struggle eventually led to India’s first ‘emm negative‘ Blood case – 11th such case in the world.
‘Anti AMM, A Rare Specific to High Incidence Antigen EMM in an Indian Patient Defining the New Blood Group System (ISBT042)’ in Asian Journal of Transfusion Science by Ripal Shah, Snehal Senjaliya and Sanmukh Joshi published in Asian Journal of Transfusion Science has been done. , Dr Ripal Shah, Director, First Blood Bank in Ahmedabad said that when matching blood was not found in Rajkot Blood Bank, the patient reached Ahmedabad with the same result. “He needed it for coronary artery bypass grafting surgery. An antibody in the blood was reacting in the saline and antiglobulin steps. Even the blood of his children didn’t match that,” she said.
The blood samples were later sent to Surat for advanced analysis and eventually to a facility in the US. The results indicated that the blood lacked the EMM phenotype. “It is present in almost all human red blood cells (RBC) thus, its absence made it difficult to match with any existing sample. As the patient had no history of transfusion, this happened naturally. Among his relatives, only his brother has the same blood group, but it is not so.”
“The case was important in identifying the AMM as a new blood group system, which was assigned the symbol ISBT042,” the paper said.
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