School Functioning Activity of Bengali Thalassemic Children Attending a Tertiary Care Hospital of Eastern India

Introduction: The study was conducted to assess the school activity of thalassemic children and to reveal the relationship between school activity with the socio-demographic factors as well as clinico-therapeutic profile. Methods: A total of 365 admitted thalassemic patients of Burdwan Medical College (ages 5 to 12 years) were participated in this cross sectional descriptive study conducted on from July 2011 to June 2012. Their parents were interviewed using school functioning domain of Paediatric Quality of Life Inventory 4.0 Generic Core Scale. Independent t test or Mann-Whitney U test, and analysis of variance (ANOVA) or Kruskal-Wallis test were applied to observe the difference between mean values in accordance to their applicability. Statistically significant factors in bivariate analysis were considered for binary logistic regression. Results: Mean score of school activity was 49.42 ± 15.30 out of 100. 49.3% thalassemic children had fair (50-74.9) school functioning score. Twenty percent of the children were presently not going to school, 11.8% never went to school and the remaining 8.2% were dropped out. Binary logistic regressions revealed that school activity worsened 4 times with the increase in frequency of blood transfusion single time per year. Patients belonging to joint family and family with no positive history of such disease, had 3.4 and 3.9 times worse school activity than nuclear family and family with positive child history respectively. Male children had 2 times more poor school activity than female. Conclusion: School functioning activity of Bengali thalassemic children is generally poor, but counselling of parents and families can improve the situation.