The efficacy of iron chelator regimes in reducing cardiac and hepatic iron in patients with thalassaemia major: a clinical observational study

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Available iron chelation regimes in thalassaemia may achieve different changes in cardiac and hepatic iron as assessed by MR. The aim of this study was to assess the efficacy of four available iron chelator regimes in 232 thalassaemia major patients by assessing the rate of change in repeated measurements of cardiac and hepatic MR.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>For the heart, deferiprone and the combination of deferiprone and deferoxamine significantly reduced cardiac iron at all levels of iron loading. As patients were on deferasirox for a shorter time, a second analysis ("Initial interval analysis") assessing the change between the first two recorded MR results for both cardiac and hepatic iron (minimum interval 12 months) was made. Combination therapy achieved the most rapid fall in cardiac iron load at all levels and deferiprone alone was significantly effective with moderate and mild iron load. In the liver, deferasirox effected significant falls in iron load and combination therapy resulted in the most rapid decline.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>With the knowledge of the efficacy of the different available regimes and the specific iron load in the heart and the liver, appropriate tailoring of chelation therapy should allow clearance of iron. Combination therapy is best in reducing both cardiac and hepatic iron, while monotherapy with deferiprone or deferasirox are effective in the heart and liver respectively. The outcomes of this study may be useful to physicians as to the chelation they should prescribe according to the levels of iron load found in the heart and liver by MR.</p

36 ELECTRONIC SYSTEMS AND CONTROL DIVISION RESEARCH 2003 A Compression/Decompression Scheme for Embedded Systems Code

This paper presents a compression scheme for embedded RISC microprocessors&apos; code. The scheme achieves better compression ratios (around 0.57) than other reported implementations, and as the Instruction Cache (ICache) holds compressed instructions its effective size is increased and the hit ratio is improved. Moreover, the processor remains unaware of the compression and its functionality is fully preserved. Other important benefits are the reduction in power consumption and improvement of performance brought about by instruction cache compression, which are still to be quantified. The scheme has required the resolutions of issues that arise from both memory and ICache data misalignment and from the compressed to uncompressed address space mapping. These resolutions are briefly described here