Quality of life in children and adolescents with beta thalassemia

TL;DR

This study finds that children and adolescents with beta thalassemia have lower quality of life compared to healthy peers, especially in physical and emotional health.

Contribution

The study provides empirical evidence on quality of life differences in beta thalassemia patients using the PedsQL 4.0 questionnaire in a Greek cohort.

Findings

Children with beta thalassemia show significantly lower quality of life in physical health, emotional health, and school activities compared to healthy controls.

Younger children (5-7 years) report higher quality of life in physical health and overall scores than older children.

Combination therapy is associated with better quality of life than subcutaneous therapy in thalassemia patients.

Abstract

Children and adolescents with thalassemia suffer from chronicity of the disease and its treatment, including transfusion dependence and complications of iron overload.

To investigate the quality of life of children and adolescents with Beta Thalassaemia.

This study is a cross-sectional study conducted at the Greek public Children’s Hospital. PedsQL ™ 4.0 Generic Core Scale (Greek version) was used to evaluate HRQOL in 41 thalassemia patients aged between 5 and 18 years and in 41 healthy controls of the same age range. For the analysis, the Statistic Package (SPSS ver.24) was used. Using Spearman’s correlation coefficient, t-test and MannWhitney tests were used, while for variables with three or more levels the Anova and Kruskall-Wallis. In order to investigate the relationship between two quantitative variables, Spearman’s correlation coefficient was used, while the relationship between two qualitative variables was used to control x2. As a statistical significance level, α = 5% was defined.

Of the 41 children with beta Thalassemia who participated in the study, 48.8% (n = 20) were boys and 51.2% (n = 21) girls. The mean age of children was 10.02 ± 4.10 years. For healthy children who participated in the study 51.2% (n = 21) were boys while 48.8% (n = 20) were girls. The mean age of the children was 9.63 ± 3.77 years. Children with Beta Thalassaemia have a lower quality of life in Physical Health and Activity(<0,001), Emotional Health(0,031), School Activities(0,008), Psychosocial Health(0,014), and the overall PedsQL 4.0 (<0,001)questionnaire compared to healthy children. Children between the ages of 5 and 7 have higher levels of quality of life in physical health and activity than older children(<0,001). In addition, children aged 5 to 7 have higher quality of life and overall PedsQL 4.0 score than older children(0,033) Children receiving combination therapy show better quality of life than children receiving subcutaneous therapy (total PedsQL 4.0 <0,001).

Children and adolescents in all five categories had a better quality of life, after improved iron chelating methods and other psychosocial interventions.

None Declared