Sufferers of one of the world’s most common genetic disorders can have their risk of dying reduced dramatically with the use of a scanning technique developed by British scientists.

Seventy per cent of patients with thalassaemia, a blood disease involving defects in haemoglobin production that causes anaemia, currently die of heart failure.

Researchers at the Royal Brompton Hospital and Imperial College London have made a breakthrough in the monitoring of the disorder. A study of the scanning advance, which allows the identification of patients at risk of imminent heart failure, has been shown to cut mortality rates by 71 per cent...read more