Gino Schilirò, Antonio Russo, Cattedra di Ematologia Pediatrica, Istituto di Clinica Pediatrica I, Università di Catania, Viale A. Doria 6, I-95125 Catania (Italy) It is now widely accepted that the best treatment for thalassemia major is a precocious and regular transfusional regimen with the aim of maintaining pretransfusional Hb levels of 10.511 g/dl [1]. Such an approach, by minimizing the ...

Mild iron deficiency induced by treatment with the iron chelator desferrioxamine reduced the incidence and severity of joint inflammation associated with adjuvant disease in rats but did not alter the local primary inflammatory response or the systemic sequelae. Both rats treated with desferrioxamine and control rats showed increased levels of alpha 1 acid glycoprotein, characteristic pathologi...

A wide variety of studies in vitro, in vivo, and in clinical trials have demonstrated that the chelator currently used to treat iron overload disease, desferrioxamine, has anti-proliferative effects against both leukemia and neuroblastoma. However, the efficacy of desferrioxamine is severely limited due to its poor ability to permeate cell membranes and chelate intracellular iron pools. These s...

Due to the necessity of iron for housekeeping functions, nutrition, morphogenesis and secondary metabolite production, siderophore piracy could be a key strategy in soil and substrate colonization by microorganisms. Here we report that mutants of bacterium Streptomyces coelicolor unable to produce desferrioxamine siderophores could recover growth when the plates were contaminated by indoor air ...

Chronically transfused patients develop iron overload that leads to organ damage and ultimately to death. The introduction of the iron-chelating agent, desferrioxamine mesylate, dramatically improved the life expectancy of these patients. However, the very demanding nature of this treatment (subcutaneous continuous infusion via a battery-operated portable pump) has been the motivation for attem...

The aim of this study was the evaluation of hearing threshold in patients with beta thalasemia major. For this purpose, 178 patients who were under regular chelation therapy with desferrioxamine (DFO) were selected and underwent ear, nose, throat examinations and audiological evaluations. Patients were between 4 to 25 years old and 54.9% were male and 45.1% were female. Three patients were excl...

Previous work suggested that during the catabolism of haemoglobin a physico-chemical form of iron was released which was more readily chelatable by desferrioxamine than normal storage forms, as ferritin-haemosiderin. Desferrioxamine chelation was therefore investigated in five patients with major fractures in which haemoglobin catabolism is greatly enhanced by the red cell destruction which pro...

hydroxypyridinone iron chelators are currently the main candidates for development of orally active iron chelating alternatives to desferrioxamine (dfo). in the present study, the relative efficacy and liver toxicity of a bidentate chelator, 2-methyl-3-hydroxypyridin-4-one (mhpo), was studied in iron overloaded rats and compared with those of dfo. for iron overloading, rats received i.p. inject...

Further experience with the differential ferrioxamine test (Fielding, 1965) for the measurement of body-iron chelation has led to modifications which include (1) an improved standard for the estimation of ferrioxamine, (2) simplified preparation of the test dose, (3) restriction of fluid during the test and (4) simplified methods of calculation. The principle of the test remains the same: an in...