Can blood type change?

After the child is born, the hospital will examine the child's body and then know the blood type. Then, if you go to the hospital for a physical examination in the future and check the blood type, you will find that the blood type will never change. Everyone knows that there are many types of blood types. The most common ones include type A, type B, type AB and type O. There are also some special blood types, such as panda blood, etc. So will a person's blood type change?

Can blood type change?

A person's blood type is innate and will not change throughout life. However, under certain circumstances, a person's blood type can change. The first special situation that can change blood type is the transformation after bone marrow stem cell transplantation. If a person suffers from a blood disease, such as leukemia or aplastic anemia, the patient's body's hematopoietic function will be weakened and destroyed. The human hematopoietic function is completed by stem cells in the bone marrow. The patient's hematopoietic function is damaged, which means that there is a problem with his hematopoietic stem cells, so he needs to transplant hematopoietic stem cells from another person's bone marrow. After the bone marrow stem cells are transplanted, the patient's (recipient's) blood type may change. After receiving a bone marrow transplant, the recipient's red blood cell type will become the donor's red blood cell type. The reason is that bone marrow stem cell transplantation to patients is mainly carried out through HLA matching, so transplantation can be performed even if the ABO blood type between the recipient and the donor is incompatible. However, after bone marrow transplantation, the patient's own hematopoietic stem cells gradually degenerate and even completely lose their function, and the patient's red blood cells continue to die. The transplanted donor's stem cells then take over the hematopoietic function, and the patient's blood type slowly changes to the donor's blood type.

There is another type of blood type change which is temporary or incomplete, so in essence it is not a blood type change. There are many reasons for this temporary change in blood type, such as immature development of infants and young children, illness, especially cancer, blood transfusions, medication, and radiation therapy, all of which can change or superficially change a person's blood type in the short term. For example, if a patient is infused with a large amount of colloidal solutions such as dextran in a short period of time, the colloidal molecules in the solution may adsorb antigens on the surface of red blood cells, causing the original red blood cell antigens of the patient to change, thereby causing a change in blood type.

Another example of a transient change in blood type is in cancer patients. First, if they receive radiotherapy, large doses of radiation may cause gene mutations and changes in antigens on the surface of red blood cells, thereby causing blood type changes; secondly, due to the tumor itself, it can cause changes in red blood cell antigens or weaken the antigenicity of the antigens on the red blood cells, which may appear to have changed blood type during testing. However, this blood type change is only a phenotypic change, not a genotypic variation.

For example, a 39-year-old male patient's blood type changed from type O to type B one month after being diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. Therefore, during treatment, he changed from transfusing type O blood to type B blood. Another 16-year-old male teenager's blood type changed from O to B four months after being diagnosed with acute non-lymphocytic leukemia, and his blood transfusion treatment was adjusted accordingly.

However, this type of blood type change is temporary and incomplete, and the blood type may change back to its original type once the disease is under control.

Blood types are all inherited, and this inheritance is determined by genes. The antigens on a person's red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets are determined by genes, thus forming a unique blood type. The genes that determine blood type can by no means be the same as the genes that determine a person's neural type and the genes that control various neurotransmitters and hormones. There is no relationship between blood type and personality.