Diagnosis and Treatment of Acquired Hemolytic Anemia

In the early years of this century several French workers 1 described a form of hemolytic anemia in which autoagglutination of the patient's red blood cells was frequently observed and a circulating hemolysin often demonstrable. This entity was described as acquired hemolytic anemia to distinguish it from the congenital variety. The concept did not receive widespread acceptance for a number of years, and many such cases were undoubtedly misclassified as hereditary hemolytic anemias. In 1938, Dameshek and associates 2 demonstrated that hemolytic anemias of varying degrees of severity could be experimentally produced by the injection of anti-red-blood-cell serums. The erythrocytes of animals so treated became spherocytic, a characteristic previously considered pathognomonic for the congenital type of hemolytic anemia. Nevertheless, until some seven years ago the demonstration of anti-red-blood-cell antibodies in human beings with hemolytic anemia was possible in only a fraction of the cases. The introduction of new techniques, derived