Blood Types CAN change

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Almost always, an individual has the same blood group for life, but very rarely an individual’s blood type changes through addition or suppression of an antigen in infection, malignancy, or autoimmune disease.

Another more common cause of blood type change is a bone marrow transplant. Bone-marrow transplants are performed for many leukemias and lymphomas, among other diseases. If a person receives bone marrow from someone of a different ABO type (e.g., a type A patient receives a type O bone marrow), the patient’s blood type should eventually becomes the donor’s type, as the patient’s hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) are destroyed, either by ablation of the bone marrow or by the donor’s T-cells. Once all the patient’s original red blood cells have died, they will have been fully replaced by new cells derived from the donor HSCs. Provided the donor had a different ABO type, the new cells’ surface antigens will be different from those on the surface of the patient’s original red blood cells.

Though it’s rare, here is yet another case:

From Rh positive to Rh negative:

We report a female patient whose Rh phenotype shifted from RhD-positive to RhD-negative over a 3-year period (1991–94), during which time she was treated with mastectomy (1992) and local irradiation for a low-grade recurrent breast cancer. She was diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukaemia in 1994, and has since then received chemotherapy. The patient was repeatedly typed as O, RhD-positive between 1965 and 1991 and was repeatedly found RhD-negative after 1994. Bcr-Abl transcripts typical of Ph1 chromosome were detected. Molecular analysis indicated that the patient was heterozygous at the RH locus, carrying one haplotype in which the RHD gene exhibited a single nucleotide deletion (G600) resulting in a frameshift and premature stop codon, and a normal RHCE gene (allele Ce). The second haplotype contained only the RHCE gene (allele ce) and was normal. Further analysis carried out on total leucocytes, purified neutrophils, EBV-lymphoblastoid cell line and cultured erythroblasts indicated that the G600 deletion was restricted to the myeloid lineage. No modification of other blood group antigens could be detected. These findings suggest a somatic mutation which most probably occurred in a stem cell common to the myeloid lineage.

Source:
Shift from Rh-positive to Rh-negative phenotype caused by a somatic mutation within the RHD gene in a patient with chronic myelocytic leukaemia
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1365-2141.1998.00895.x

Here is one more

from B to O:

A patient with blood group type O accidentally received a blood group B cardiac allograft. He died almost 5 years after transplantation because of transplant vasculopathy. We monitored the expression of ABO-type antigens on the vascular endothelial cells of the cardiac allograft for 44 months, using monoclonal antibodies for immunohistology. The antigenic profile of the graft endothelial cells changed progressively from B to O. This change was first detectable 14 months after transplantation and it was most prominent at the end of the observation period. Thus, we have shown that the allograft blood type of the endothelium of this patient’s heart began to change from type B to his own, 1 year after transplantation. By 44 months post-transplantation, it had changed to O type.

Source:
Histo-blood group type change of the graft from B to O after ABO mismatched heart transplantation
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15135601/

For more cases previously listed, continue here…

But remember:

If you think your blood type may have changed, you could be right.

It seems, however, more likely that human error played a role.

ALWAYS GET RETESTED.

Especially when paternity is being questioned.

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