A major international study has found that regular blood transfusions prevent the vast majority of strokes in children with sickle cell disease, doctors said on Thursday. Researchers said they ended the study 16 months early because preliminary results showed that the treatment reduced the risk of stroke by 90 percent in young patients at high risk for the debilitating complication, and it would be wrong to limit it to just some patients in the study.
Stroke is a frequent complication for children with sickle cell disease.
Screening and treating those most at risk could prevent paralysis, brain damage, learning difficulties and other problems in a couple of thousand of the children afflicted with the inherited blood disorder, experts said. This means we should be able to make a major impact on stroke in children with sickle cell disease. The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health, the sponsor of the trial, issued a clinical alert on Thursday to doctors treating children with sickle cell disease, urging them to begin screening patients for those who might be at high risk of stroke and to consider the transfusion therapy as a preventive measure. Although this is not a cure, transfusions offer these children the hope of avoiding the devastating consequences of stroke. Researchers made the announcement here at a national conference commemorating the 25th anniversary of the institutes' Sickle Cell Disease Program, which sponsors much of the nation's research aimed at combating sickle cell anemia and related disorders.