Dear Partners,

 Kindly find below an excerpt of a letter to the editor published recently,

Correlation of liver iron concentration determined by R2 MRI with serum ferritin in patients with thalassemia intermedia.

Ali Taher,1,2 Fuad El Rassi,1 Hussain Isma’eel,1 Suzane Koussa,2 Adlette Inati,2,3 Maria Domenica Cappellini4

1American University of Beirut, Beirut; 2Chronic Care Center, Hazmieh, 3Rafik Hariri University Hospital, Beirut, Lebanon, and 4Fondazione Policlinico IRCCS, University of Milan, Italy Correspondence: Ali Taher, MD, Department of Internal Medicine Hematology-Oncology Division, American University of Beirut, Letters to the Editor

Thalassemia intermedia is a highly diverse group of thalassemia syndromes associated with anemia and a range of specific complications, such as extramedullary hematopoiesis, leg ulcers, gallstones and a hypercoagulable state, which are uncommon in patients with thalassemia major.1 The degree of anemia present in patients with thalassemia intermedia is typically mild and generally does not require regular blood transfusion therapy. However, patients can still be at risk of the clinical sequelae of iron overload (as commonly seen in regularly transfused thalassemia major patients) due to increased intestinal iron absorption triggered by chronic anemia, ineffective erythropoiesis and, possibly, decreased serum hepcidin.2,3 The principal methods of determining body iron levels are measurement of serum ferritin levels and assessment of liver iron concentration from biopsy tissue. (...)