Increasing hydroxyurea dose helps to keep young sickle cell patients out of the hospital

Increasing hydroxyurea dose helps to keep young sickle cell patients out of the hospital

By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Pediatrics Week -- St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital investigators have shown that using the drug hydroxyurea to boost average fetal hemoglobin levels above 20 percent in children and teenagers with sickle cell anemia was associated with at least a two-fold reduction in hospitalization for any reason.

Results of the federally funded HUSTLE study--Hydroxyurea Study of Long-Term Effects--appeared online this week in the American Journal of Hematology.

The findings should help settle the debate about how to optimize hydroxyurea for treatment of sickle cell disease in young people. Rather than calculating a standard dose of hydroxyurea based on patients’ weight, researchers used a dose-escalation approach to determine the maximum tolerated dose for each of the 230 St. Jude patients enrolled in the study.

“Our analysis showed that using this approach, hospitalizations for the average patient fell to less than one …

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(2017-12-02), Increasing hydroxyurea dose helps to keep young sickle cell patients out of the hospital, Pediatrics Week, 203, ISSN: 1944-2645, BUTTER® ID: 014762200