Randomized controlled trials investigating the association of perioperative allogeneic blood transfusion with postoperative bacterial infection in patients undergoing abdominal3-5,7,22,23 or open heart6 surgery.

For each RCT, the figure shows the OR of postoperative infection in recipients of buffy-coat–reduced4-6,22,23 or standard7 allogeneic RBCs or whole blood3 as compared with recipients of autologous or WBC-reduced allogeneic RBCs or whole blood (Table 3). For the studies of Jensen et al3,5 and Tartter et al,7 the OR is shown not as reported by the authors, but as recalculated according to an intention-to-treat analysis.54 For the study of van de Watering et al,6 the depicted OR represents a comparison between 2 groups, that is, the recipients of buffy-coat–reduced RBCs and the recipients of WBC-reduced RBCs filtered before or after storage. Each OR is surrounded by its 95% CI. If the 95% CI of the OR includes the null value of 1, the TRIM effect is not statistically significant. The data are plotted on a logarithmic scale extending from 0.1 to 100.