How often should Apheresis be performed?
There is generally no magic number of procedures that should be performed for a given patient. In many cases, the patient is reevaluated after 2 or 3 procedures to see if they are responding. For many diseases, such as the neurologic syndromes, the clinicians have set formulas that they follow. This is fine, as long as it seems reasonable. For example, they may do 5 procedures over two weeks. Other times, the procedure is done daily until the patient improves (examples: TTP patients. Improvement in the patient with TTP is followed by monitoring the platelet count and the LDH level). Some procedures are one time only — for example, red cell exchange is done one time in most patients in crisis. However, some patients are on a routine schedule of treatment such as once every 4 weeks to prevent the need for emergent treatment.
