Avaliação do uso de brincos e body piercing como indicadores de soropositividade para doenças transfusionais

Abstract

Introduction: Blood and blood products are still essential for the treatment of several medical conditions for which they have no substitutes. Blood for transfusion is obtained from volunteers who go through several steps during the process of donation Association between tattoos and seropositivity to transfusion-transmissible diseases (TTDs); and it has been proposed that in certain settings having a tattoo can be an exclusion criterion for blood donation. By analogy it could be though that seropositivity to TTDs was also associated with the use of earring and body piercing. Objective: To assess whether the use of earring and/or body piercing can be indicators of seropositivity to the following TTDs: hepatitis B, hepatitis C, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection, Chagas disease, and syphilis. Material and methods: Secondary analysis of a data set from a cross-sectional study conducted at the Universidade Federal de Uberlândia, and that resulted in a doctoral thesis (Nishioka,S.A.-Tattoos as indicators of transfusion-transmitted disease in Brazil: a matched hospital-based cross-sectional study.Montreal:McGill University,2000.166p). The exposure of main interest were having earring or body piercing, whereas the outcomes of interest were presence of any serologic marker of infections by hepatitis B(HBV), hepatitis C(HCV) HIV, Treponema pallidum or Trypanosoma cruzi, determined by the following tests: HBsAG, anti-HBc, anti- HCV,anti-HIV, VDRL and anti- Trypanosoma cruzi Results: No association between earring and TTDs was observed when the odds ratios were adjusted by confounders, even when the analyses were restricted to males. Body piercing was observed in only two women in the study population, and therefore could not be analyzed.Conclusion: Earring is not associated with seropositivity to TTDs, and should not be used as an exclusion criterion for blood donation.