Life events and donor lapse in Denmark

Abstract

BackgroundThe likelihood of donating blood changes over the life course, with life events shown to influence entry to and exit from the donor population. While these previous findings provide valuable insights for donor management, blood collection agencies need to be cautious about generalizing findings to other countries as blood donor behaviour is context-specific. To examine cross-country variations in donor behaviour, the repeatability of a previous Dutch study on life events and blood donor lapse is examined by using a sample of Danish donors.Study design and methodsRegister data from Statistics Denmark was linked to the Scandinavian Donations and Transfusions database (n = 152,887). Logistic regressions were conducted to examine the association between life events in 2009-2012 and blood donor lapse in 2013-2014.ResultsOf the total sample, 69,079 (45.2%) donors lapsed. Childbirth and losing a job increased the lapsing risk by 11% and 16%, respectively, while health-related events in the family (i.e., blood transfusion, disease and death) decreased the lapsing risk by 5%, 7% and 9%, respectively. ConclusionLife events are associated with donor lapse of Danish donors. These results are comparable to previous findings from the Netherlands (i.e., childbirth and labor market transitions increased lapsing risk; health-related events decreased lapsing risk), with two thirds of the associations being in the same direction. Differences between study results were mainly related to effect sizes and demographic compositions of the donor pools. We argue contextual factors to be of importance in blood donor studies.