Abstract
Despite the fact that Sickle Cell Anaemia (SCA) patients undergo blood transfusion to reduce the risk of some complications associated with the disease, however, regular blood transfusion inevitably causes iron overload. In Sudan, the levels of iron in blood-transfused patients are regularly monitored using the serum ferritin, which is widely known to be an unreliable marker for body iron balance. The use of magnetic resonance imaging techniques such as theT2 and T2* sequences have demonstrated promising results in estimating iron concentration in transfused dependent patients Wood (Blood 106:1460-1465, 2005, [1]). There is however little data on the literature that systematically compared T2 and T2* in sickle cell anaemia (SCA) Wood (Am J Hematol 90:806-810, 2015, [2]). The aims of this work are to investigate two optimised T2 and T2* sequences, determine their viability for the quantification of iron in transfused dependent SCA and compare them to the standard serum ferritin method. The two optimised sequences were subsequently investigated on livers of 10 volunteers and 25 SCA paediatric patients using a 1.5T Philips scanner located at Al Ateeba Hospital in Khartoum State-Capital of Sudan. Ethical approval for the study was obtained from the National Ministry of Health-Health Research Council-Sudan. Linear correlation was found between T2* and serum ferritin (R-2 = 0.949, P < 0.001), T2 and serum (R-2 = 0.946, P < 0.001) and T2 and T2* measurements (R-2 = 0.921, P = 0.789). The results demonstrate that both of the optimised T2 and T2* sequences could provide reliable measurements in the quantification of range of iron concentrations on transfused dependent paediatric SCA patients.