EVALUATION OF THE EFFECT OF

B-thalassemia major is a chronic haemolytic anaemia. Childrenusually present with pallor loss of appetite, failure to thri ve andhepatosplenomegaly. Repeated blood transfusions are the basis of therapyto prevent anaemia. Severe iron-over-load develops progressively inpatients with transfusion-dependent homozygous B-thalassemia.Therefore iron chelating agent are given in the form of subcutaneousdesferoxamine.This study was designed to find out the effect of desferoxamine 011hearing sensitivity.Also to correlate hearing sensitivity with duration of drug intake,age of the patient, level of serum ferritin and haemoglobin level. Thiswas achieved by examining fifty patients with B-thalassemia major 25patients did not receive any iron chelation therapy (control group) and 25patients receiving desferoxamine (study group). Each patients wassubjected to full history, otological examination and audiologicalevaluation. Audiological tests included pure tone audiometry, speechaudiometry and acoustic immittancemetry.61