Giving blood often may make your blood cells healthier

Repeated blood donors may be more than a warm and mysterious feeling of altruism, as giving blood may also enhance your ability to produce healthy blood cells, which reduces the risk of leukemia.

Hector Herga Encabo At the Francis Crick Institute in London and its colleagues, they analyzed the genetic data extracted from the blood cells donated by 217 men in Germany, between the ages of 60 and 72, who gave blood more than 100 times. They also looked at samples of 212 men from a similar era who donated blood less than 10 times, and they found that frequent donors were more likely to blood cells that carry certain mutations in a gene called gene. Dnmt3a.

To understand this difference, the team designed the engineering human blood cells – which lead to all blood cells in the body – with these mutations and add them to laboratory dishes with non -modified cells. In order to imitate the effects of blood donation, they also added a hormone called EPO, which the body produces after blood loss, to some dishes.

A month later, cells with frequent frequent mutations grew by 50 percent faster than those that have no mutations, but only in the dishes that contain EPO. Without this hormone, both types of cells grew at a similar rate.

This indicates that, every blood donation, you will have an explosion from EPO in your system and this will prefer cell growth with these Dnmt3a Encabo says: “Mutations,” says Encabo.

To investigate whether the presence of more mutated blood cells is useful, the team mixed them with cells that carry mutations that increase the risk of leukemia, and it was found again that with the presence of repeated EPO cells, they greatly outperformed others, and were more able to produce red blood cells. This indicates that the Dnmt3a Encabo says the mutations are useful and may suppress the growth of cancer cells.

“Like a blood donation, it provides a choice to enhance the physical fitness of your stem cells and their ability to renew,” he says. Toye ash At Bristol University, UK. “You can not only save the life of someone, but may also boost physical fitness in the blood system.”

More work is needed to verify whether this is already the case, he says Mark Mansour At College University London, where laboratory experiments provide a very simplified image of what is happening in the body. “This must be validated in a much larger group, through different races, through females and other age groups,” Mansour says. It also indicates that the donors are without Dnmt3a The boom may not see this benefit.

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