We routinely use heparin for our bone marrow aspirates and it serves us well. We provide a transport media with tons of heparin and volume- thus we anticoagulae by heparin and dilution. To prepare the transport media we takee 15 mL RPMI in a 50 mL conical tube and add 50,000 units of heparin in 5 mL PBS to final of 2,500 units/mL, in 20 mL. We instruct the clinician to rinse the syringe with sterile heparin and leave some in before aspiration. Immediately post-aspiration they should place the bone marrow in transport media, cap tightly and mix by inverting 5-6 times. We see the jelly you describe in AML (which often clots against tremendous odds) and occasionally in lymphoma cases, but this is rare. I think you didn't have enough anticoagulant. Maryalice > > >Hi > >I read your comments on ACD in the Purdue message board. I wonder if >you can explain this. > >I work on blood and bone marrow specimens, usually with EDTA. Blood >is no problem but bone marrow can really be awful. Occasionally, >like today, a bone marrow sample that i got from antoher hospital >looks like it has jelly- fied. it is not clotted. just STICKY as can >be and pretty impossible to work with. Since i got the sample still >in the syringe (with a cap on it) i strongly suspect the >anticoagulant is heparin. because bone marrow is not an easy >procedure i tried to salvage some cells. I usually q-prep or >ammoniaum chloride, but this time only ficol saved a few but most of >the cells were gone. > >questions: >what anticoagulant do you prefer for bone marrow samples? >have you come accross this phenomenon and can you explain it. >is there anything i can do to salvage the sample. > >thanks for your time > >judith chezar >Israel > > >Content-Type: text/x-vcard; charset=us-ascii; > name="virginia.litwin.vcf" >Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit >Content-Description: Card for Virginia M Litwin >Content-Disposition: attachment; > filename="virginia.litwin.vcf" > >Attachment converted: HD_1:virginia.litwin.vcf 5 (TEXT/ttxt) (00027B5B) Maryalice Stetler-Stevenson Director Flow Cytometry Unit Laboratory of Pathology, NCI, NIH
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