170 Bulletin UASVM, Veterinary Medicine 66(1)/2009 ISSN 1843-5270; Electronic ISSN 1843-5378 Value of Crossmatch Tests for Verifying the Compatibility in Dog Blood Transfusion Therapy Laurent OGNEAN 1), Meda MOLDOVAN 1), , Cristina CERNEA 1), , Mihai CERNEA 1) 1) University of Agricultural Science and Veterinary Medicine Cluj Napoca, Calea Manastur street, number 3-5 lognean@yahoo.com Abstract. In case of pets, dogs and cats transfusions are already a current practice, beeing an intensive therapy procedure. In a group of dogs that underwent intensive therapy hole blood transfusion was used based on major and minor Crossmatch test results in order to establishing blood compatibility. The slide and tube techniques used were original and taken from different authors. Using 15 potential donors, 5 patients were transfused, one of them diagnosed with osteosarcoma. In 4 of the patients, all donor tested were compatible and they recovered after blood transfusion. Incompatibility problems appeared in the patient with osteosarcoma, for which 11 potential donors were tested and among them only 2 were compatible, the others showed positive agglutination reaction in major crossmatch In patients with positive reactions of incompatibility, the results were relevant in both variants (slide, tube), meaning the high level of plasmatic alloantibodies. After the evaluation of blood compatibility using major and minor crossmatch tests it was decided to opt for blood transfusion which made possible the recovery of 4 out of 5 dogs undergoing intensive therapy. The development was fatal for the patient with osteosarcoma because of the severe complications caused by the cancer. The highly positive major crossmatch results obtained in the patient with osteosarcoma and 9 potential donors, who never received a transfusion, suggest the possibility of producing alloantibodies to some foreign cancer induced proteins, cross-reactant with common erythrocyte antigens. Key words: pretransfusion evaluation, incompatibility, blood agglutination, osteosarcoma INTRODUCTION Establishing the blood transfusion compatibility in dogs can be done by using crossmatch testing alone or in addition to blood typing of the donor and receiver. There are cases when the crossmatch test can be sufficient for a safe transfusion therapy while in other cases blood typing is necessary. The large diversity of the erythrocytes antigenic profiles is characterized by the fact that dogs do not have naturally occurring antibodies to the 13 clinically significant erythrocyte antigens, as we can see in cats and other species. (Giger and col, 2005) It is notable that the crossmatch tests only the presence or the absence of the plasmatic anti-erythrocytes antibodies in the tested partners (Giger and Blais, 2005) and for this reason doesn’t exclude the possibility of the immunogenic transfusion reaction, so-called febrile non- hemolytic transfusion reactions, generated by the leukocyte/platelet.