ALBERT

Description: Introduction: An assessment of morbidity and mortality caused by transfusion dependent thalassemia in India has never really been done despite thalassemia being the most prevalent life threatening non-communicable disorder of childhood. There is little structured understanding identifying the key risk factors feeding into research and policy making for effective management of thalassemia. With an estimated 10,000-12,000 children born with thalassemia each year in India, in addition to increasing focus on early pregnancy targeted screening, it seems critical to increase our understanding of risk factors associated with early mortality and morbidity. This is also relevant to family counselling about management options. Methodology: A retrospective analysis of mortality key risk factors in patients suffering from thalassemia major from 5 thalassemia day care centres in India was carried out. This included a total of 1,087 patients (656 males and 431 females with a median age of 8.6 years) enrolled for care between 1 Jan 2010 - 31 Oct 2018 at these centres. These centres were set up by a non-profit organization in collaboration with blood banks and /hospital facilities with the objective to provide comprehensive thalassemia care; A common web-based application was employed (ThalCare™). This system was used to track information associated with treatment including disease history at enrolment, demographic data and follow-up information. All analyses were performed with R Statistical software (3.5.2). Survival analysis was done from the age at presentation to the centre till October 2018. The reasons for mortality were categorized. Overall survival was also separately analyzed for patients in their 1st,2nd, 3rd or subsequent decades of life. The Cnaan and Ryan approach was used as patients entered and left the study cohort (left censored and right truncated data) and observation began only at enrolment and not at disease onset Results: The median age at enrolment was 5.4 years and the median follow up at the centre was 2.5 years. A total of 86 patients were cured by bone marrow transplantation (BMT), 13 of them moved to other centres for care and 41 patients died during the study period (28 males and 13 females). The median age at death was 15.4 years. Actuarial survival at 26.9 years of age was 50% (Figure 1) and under-five mortality was 7 times higher than the general population. Patients with transfusion-transmitted infections (TTI) had 3.4 times higher risk of death (p=0.031). Serum ferritin 〉4,000 ng/dL was associated with 4.6 times higher risk of mortality compared to ferritin 2 gm/dL/week had 7.7 times higher mortality risk compared to