Cardiac and hepatic iron and ejection fraction in thalassemia major: Multicentre prospective comparison of combined Deferiprone and Deferoxamine therapy against Deferiprone or Deferoxamine Monotherapy

Table 2 **Baseline descriptive statistics of the treatment groups composed of patients with global heart T2* value < 20 ms**

	P	Deferiprone group (n = 9)	Combined group (n = 26)	Deferoxamine group (n = 21)	P
Age (yrs)	0.358	29.7 ± 5.2	27.6 ± 5.7	32.8 ± 6.5	0.005
Male (%)	0.700	66.7%	53.8%	23.8%	0.072
Chel. starting age (yrs)	0.918	5.0 ± 3.5	5.3 ± 5.3	6.7 ± 6.0	0.504
Mean pre-transfusion Hb (g/dl)	0.180	9.9 ± 0.4	9.6 ± 0.5	9.8 ± 0.6	0.217
Mean serum ferritin (ng/l)	0.001	1475 ± 2753	2135 ± 966	1367 ± 988	<0.0001
Global Heart (ms)	0.112	12.8 ± 3.6	10.2 ± 4.3	14.4 ± 4.3	0.002
MRI CIC (mg/g dry weight)	0.096	2.20 ± 0.77	3.56 ± 2.65	1.99 ± 0.90	0.002
*N seg. With T2 < 20 ms**	0.502	14.8 ± 1.8	15.2 ± 1.7	13.0 ± 3.3	0.010
*Mid septum T2 (ms)**	0.194	13.3 ± 5.2	10.6 ± 5.4	14.6 ± 5.0	0.012
LV EF (%)	0.466	58.9 ± 5.9	61.1 ± 8.3	59.9 ± 6.8	0.583
LV EDVI (ml/m2)	0.749	90.2 ± 18.5	87.5 ± 22.2	89.9 ± 20.5	0.712
RV EF (%)	0.023	54.9 ± 5.7	60.2 ± 5.7	60.4 ± 6.0	0.927
RV EDVI (ml/m2)	0.737	89.3 ± 20.7	86.7 ± 19.7	86.1 ± 21.3	0.926
*Liver T2 (ms)**	0.011	7.5 ± 5.0	3.5 ± 3.5	8.2 ± 6.4	0.005
MRI LIC (mg/g dry weight)	0.018	8.4 ± 12.9	14.8 ± 11.8	6.8 ± 7.0	0.003

All values are quoted as mean ± SD. The P-values concern the comparison between combined and deferiprone groups and between combined and deferoxamine groups.

ISSN: 1532-429X