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Backgroundβ-haemoglobinopathies are the most common monogenic disorders worldwide. They present with extreme clinical heterogeneity, which makes generalized therapeutic approaches often ineffective. Currently available risk stratification approaches are either too complicated to be deployed at a primary healthcare level or are limited in their applicability across the spectrum of haemoglobinopathies. All current systems also classify patients into the three categories of mild, moderate and severe, where the moderate category is not well-characterized in terms of their expected prognosis.MethodsThe current study proposes a severity scoring scheme, utilizing five clinical parameters, viz., steady-state average pre-transfusion haemoglobin, age at presentation, transfusion interval, palpable splenomegaly and growth retardation to classify patients of various β-haemoglobinopathies into severe and non-severe categories. The study then proceeds to validate this scoring scheme on a clinically heterogeneous cohort of 224 Eastern Indian β-thalassaemia and β-haemoglobinopathy patients, and evaluate the predictive performance of the proposed scheme against a clinical standard.ResultsAll of the chosen parameters except steady-state haemoglobin display strong individual contribution to the final determination of severity, though steady-state haemoglobin conferred increased discriminatory power to the overall scheme. The proposed system achieved an accuracy of 94% against the clinical standard.ConclusionsThe proposed risk stratification strategy, being almost entirely empirically-determined, should possess wider applicability across the spectrum of β-haemoglobinopathies than currently existing systems, and should also be more suitable than said systems for studying genotype-phenotype correlations especially within the Eastern Indian β-haemoglobinopathy population.

Department of Chemical Engineering, Calcutta Institute of Technology, West Bengal University of Technology, Uluberia, Howrah-711 316, West Bengal, India Department of Chemistry, West Bengal State University, Barasat, Kolkata-700 126, India E-mail : mukutchem@yahoo.co.in Department of Polymer Science and Technology, University of Calcutta, 92, Acharya Prafulla Chandra Road, Kolkata-700 009, India E-mail : dipankar.chattopadhyay@gmail.com Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Industrial Membrane Research Institute, University of Ottawa, 161 Louis Pasteur St., Ottawa, ON, KIN 6N5, Canada Department of Electronic Science, University of Calcutta, 92, Acharya Prafulla Chandra Road, Kolkata-700 009, India Manuscript received 28 March 2017, accepted 13 April 2017 Recycling of waste is a major thrust area for decreasing environmental pollution. Disposed cigarette butts, a common waste material in our livelihood consisting of the cigarette filters, are toxic to aquatic life and degrade soil porosity. We report a simple process to prepare a conducting material by heat treatment of these used cigarette filters, which are composed largely of cellulose acetate. As they are non-biodegradable they therefore pose a serious threat to the environment after disposal. In keeping with the concept of recycled renewable resources, using the process of heat treatment (in Muffle furnane), we have prepared an active material from used cigarette filters. The pyrolyzed product is characterized by X-ray diffraction, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopic analysis, field emission scanning electron microscopy, ultra-violet visible spectroscopy, dynamic light scattering and zeta potential measurements. The electrical characteristics of the product have been measured to check its electrochemical behavior and results are found to be promising for further application as electronic materials.