Deferiprone versus Deferoxamine in Sickle Cell Disease: Results from a 5-year long-term Italian multi-center randomized clinical trial

Blood transfusion and iron chelation currently represent a supportive therapy to manage anemia, vasculopathy and vaso-occlusion crises in Sickle-Cell-Disease. Here we describe the first 5-year long-term randomized clinical trial comparing Deferiprone versus Deferoxamine in patients with Sickle-Cell-Disease. The results of this study show that Deferiprone has the same effectiveness as Deferoxamine in decreasing body iron burden, measured as repeated measurements of serum ferritin concentrations on the same patient over 5-years and analyzed according to the linear mixed-effects model (LMM) (p=0.822). Both chelators are able to decrease, significantly, serum ferritin concentrations, during 5-y…