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| Treatment
of the Disease |
| Thalassaemia being a genetic disorder,
no curative treatment has yet been discovered. |
| a) |
Bone
marrow transplant has to some extent been successful
in curing this dreadful disease but getting a matching
or compatible donor, extremely high cost of the
treatment, and with around 60% success rate(global
average), has kept this procedure limited only to
a handful of patients amongst hundreds of thousands
of patients world wide. |
| b) |
Blood
transfusion is virtually the only treatment available
to Thalassaemia patients.But blood transfusion has
its problems like getting infected with communicable
disease like hepatitis B and C, HIV, malaria and
others. But most severe problem arising out of blood
transfusion is Iron Overload, which
affect the vital organs like liver, pancreas, kidney
and heart. Even if a patient gets blood transfusion
eventually he would die by the age of 18 –
20 years due to heart failure as a consequence of
iron overload. |
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Iron
Overload remains the single most expensive
part of the blood transfusion dependant treatment
of Thalassaemia.Most common therapy for iron chelation
is subcutaneous injection of Deferrioxamine, commonly
known as desferal, with a micro pump over a period
of 10-12 hours, Ideally the injection should be
taken every day. However, for practical reasons
it is administered 5-6 days a week. The therapy
is painful and very expensive, cost of this Therapy
can go up to TK. 10-15,000/- per patients, which
is beyond the reach of almost all the patients in
Bangladesh. |
| c) |
Deferiprone
is an alternate to Desferal and it is taken orally.Deferiprone
is comparatively cheaper than Desferal. Unfortunately
it has a number of severe side effects which make
it the second choice for iron chelation therapy.
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| d) |
Splenectomy
is another form of treatment. When the spleen becomes
too active and starts destroying red cells of the
blood,transfusion becomes less and less effective.
Then it may becomes necessary to take the spleen
out. This operation is called splenectomy. |
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