Abstract

Background and Objectives

An important consequence of chronic blood transfusion in thalassemia is iron overload with treatment of iron chealation drugs. One of these drugs is deferiprone (L1) which is usually used as the combination therapy with desferoxamin especially in patients with iron overload. Nausea and vomiting is the common side effects of L1 which sometimes gets so bad that the patient can not tolerate the drug. We tried Enteric coated; EC with the aim of decreasing the gastric side effects.

Materials and Methods

We started enteric coated for 100 patients and followed them for gastric side effects for six months. All of them could not  tolerate the previous form of L1 because of severe nausea and vomiting.

Results

Two of our patients moved to other cities and could not be followed by this therapy; 98 patients were studied: 91 thalassemia major and 7 intermedia, 39 male, 59 female with the mean age of 25.16 + 6.03. Out of the total number, 67 (68.4%) patients were on the combination therapy because of high ferritin level and 31 (31.6%) had cardiac iron overload and high ferritin level. Four patients could not continue the treatment, 3 because of the recurrence of nausea and vomiting and 1 because of artheralgia; however, 94 (96%) could tolerate the EC form and successfully continued the treatment.

Conclusions

The enteric form of L1 had good  results on GI side effects reduction so that 96% of patients could tolerate the medication and continue the treatment without any nausea and vomiting.