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.