Clinico-epidemiological Profile of Transfusion-dependent Thalassemia Patients in a Tertiary Care Children’s Hospital in Nepal: An Observational Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: Transfusion-dependent thalassemia is a major public health concern in Nepal, with limited access to comprehensive care and paucity of national data. The main objectives of this study were to explore clinico-epidemiological profile, management practices and complications among pediatric transfusion-dependent thalassemia patients at a tertiary pediatric hospital in Nepal. Methods: This is a retrospective observational study conducted at the Thalassemia Day Care Unit, Kanti Children's Hospital, Kathmandu. Transfusion-dependent thalassemia cases registered from January 2020 to December 2024, aged less than 15 years were included. Data on demographics, clinical features, transfusion and chelation profiles, complications, and nutritional status were acquired from hospital registry and analyzed using descriptive statistics. Results: Out of 187 patients, 121 (64.71%) were males and 156 (83.42%) had β-thalassemia major. Mean age at last follow-up was 7.52±3.68 years. 83 (44.38%) were Janajatis, particularly Tharus 40 (21.39%). Median age at diagnosis was 10 months (IQR 6-22 months), with mean pre-transfusion hemoglobin level 8.86 g/dL, and average transfusion period 2.64±0.83 weeks. Among 167 (89.30%) patients receiving chelation, 37 (19.87%) had good compliance. Endocrinopathies, hepatic dysfunction and cardiac complications were observed in 104 (55.62%), 65 (34.76%) and 2 (1.07%) patients respectively. Serum ferritin levels were above 2500 ng/mL in 92 (49.19%) patients. Regular follow up was done by 56 (29.95%) patients. Conclusions: β-thalassemia major was the most common type of transfusion dependent thalassemia in our study. There was male predominance, and over half of the patients had iron overload and some form of complications of thalassemia. Regular follow up and compliance to chelation therapy has to be focused for better care of transfusion dependent thalassemia patients.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".