DOI: 10.36347/sasjs

Pages: 74-79

In the homozygous state, β thalassemia (i.e. thalassemia major) causes severe anaemia which necessitates chronic hyper transfusion therapy which ultimately leads to transfusion iron overload and often require splenectomy. The commonly adopted criteria for splenectomy is a blood consumption greater than 50% above the mean annual transfusion requirement of the splenectomised population. Serum ferritin has been used as an easily accessible serum marker for transfusion-induced iron overload. The purpose of this study was to determine serum ferritin level and preoperative splenic size and correlating with amount of transfusion in order to establish whether iron overload or splenic size can be a criterion for early splenectomy. A total of 30 patients of β thalassemia major have been evaluated. In the study it was found that neither amount of transfusion nor serum ferritin correlate significantly with splenic size (p-value being 0.323 and 0.883 respectively). But Pearson correlation coefficient of Total number of units Transfused with Serum Ferritin was calculated to be 0.858 (p-value <0.01) emphasizing statistically significant correlation between Total number of units Transfused and Serum Ferritin. So, from this study, it can be said that serum ferritin can be a good indicator for transfusional iron overload and can be used as a criterion for assessing need for splenectomy