anaemia and mortality rates was observed. Those investigators also found that the risk of anaemia appeared to decrease with RBC transfusion in patients with cardiac disease. In patients with cardiac disease, mortality increased when haemoglobin concentrations were below 95 g/l, as compared with anaemic patients with other diagnoses (55% versus 42%; P = 0.09). In the subgroup of patients with cardiac disease, increasing haemoglobin values in anaemic patients was associated with improved survival (odds ratio 0.80 for each 10 g/l increase; P = 0.012). One possible explanation for the discrepancy between the TRICC trial and this observational study may be that the attending physicians who recruited patients into the study did not enter those patients who were considered to have severe cardiac disease.