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  • QUESTION 1: Does folic acid supplementation reduce the incidence or severity of anaemia in neonates with a positive direct Coombs test?

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QUESTION 1: Does folic acid supplementation reduce the incidence or severity of anaemia in neonates with a positive direct Coombs test?
  1. Benjamin G Fisher1,
  2. Raman Lakshman2
  1. 1 Department of Paediatrics, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
  2. 2 Department of Paediatrics, West Suffolk Hospital, Bury St Edmunds, UK
  1. Correspondence to Dr Benjamin G Fisher, Department of Paediatrics, University of Cambridge, P.O. Box 116, Level 8, Addenbrooke's Hospital, Hills Road, Cambridge CB2 0QQ, UK; bgf20{at}cam.ac.uk

https://doi.org/10.1136/archdischild-2016-311508

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    Scenario

    You are called to review a healthy term neonate on the postnatal ward whose mother's blood group is O Rhesus D (RhD)-negative and whose own blood group (determined from umbilical cord blood) is A RhD-positive. A direct Coombs test is ‘2+ positive’. According to departmental protocol, the neonate should be started on oral folic acid 500 μg daily from discharge until weaning, supposedly to reduce the risk of late haemolytic anaemia. You wonder as to the value of this intervention.

    Structured clinical question

    In a neonate with a positive direct Coombs test (patient), does folic acid supplementation until weaning (intervention) compared with placebo (control) reduce the incidence or severity of anaemia (outcome)?

    Search

    Secondary sources: None.

    Primary sources: Medline and Embase were searched using the Ovid interface (1946 and 1974, respectively, to current date) in June 2016. The following keywords were used: (‘Coombs test’ or ‘anti*globulin test’ or allo*immuni*ation or iso*immuni*ation or erythroblastosis or ‘h*emolytic disease’) and (‘folic acid’ or folate) and an*emia. The results were limited to English language and the age groups infant and child. The search retrieved 39 individual articles, of which two were relevant primary sources (summarised in table 1). Further indirect evidence was obtained from a review article retrieved in the search and its references.

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    Table 1

    Does folic acid supplementation reduce the incidence or severity of anaemia in neonates with a positive direct Coombs test?

    Commentary

    The direct Coombs (or …

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    Footnotes

    • Contributors BGF: topic formulation, literature review, manuscript drafting. Both authors contributed to the interpretation of the results and revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content, and approved the final version of the manuscript.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.