RESULTS
There were 90 patients who underwent HSCT during the study period, and
69 patients met inclusion criteria. Of the 21 patients who were not
included in the analysis, 6 patients did not have a Hgb recorded within
7 days of pulmonary function testing and 15 patients did not have
acceptable PFT data. (Figure 1). The clinical characteristics of this
population study are summarized in Table 1. The average age of a child
in this study was 14.2 years old. 62% of the study population had an
active oncologic disease process, most commonly a form of leukemia.
Table 2 compares the corrected DLCO using Dinakara vs. Cotes for
different baseline Hgb levels. DLCO corrected by Dinakara was
consistently higher than that for Cotes, but this difference was only
significant for Hgb<9. These differences did not affect the
odds ratio (OR) for survival at 1 and 3 years after HSCT, which were
similar for both and not significantly increased overall regardless of
which reference equations was used (Table 3).
Pulmonary complications were common in the study cohort, with 61% of
patients experiencing at least 1 complication (Table 4). As shown in
Table 5, the mean FEV1 and FVC z-scores were significantly lower in
patients with pulmonary complications compared to those with no
complications (p=0.0022). However, there was no significant difference
in DLCOHgb between the two groups using either Cotes or
Dinakara.