turned out that in some cases it can be better to let patients be anemic than to give them someone else’s blood, especially if that blood had been in storage for a while—and that is nearly always the case. When a blood bank receives a call for blood, it normally dispatches the oldest blood first, to use up aging stock before it expires, which means that almost everybody receives old blood. Worse still, it was discovered that even fresh transfused blood actually impedes the performance of existing blood in the recipient’s body. This is where nitric oxide comes in. Most of us think of blood as
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