Comment on: Loureiro & Rozenfeld "Epidemiology of sickle cell disease hospital admissions in Brazil".

die. These living par-ticipants are accounted for using statistical techniquesthat remove or ”censor” the live participant at theirlast known contact date within a study window.In the Jamaican report, homozygous sickle cell (SS)disease was studied over a 10-year period, duringwhich 290 out of 3,301 (8.8%) patients died. In thesame paper, median age at death was reported as 24.9years for men, and 25.7 years for women. These fig-ures for Jamaicans with SS disease are directly com-parable with, and broadly similar to the reported me-dian ages at death in Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, and SaoPaulo. The dataset reported by Loureiro and Rozenfelddoes not allow the calculation of median survival. Itremains possible that median survival is similar tothose identified in Jamaica and the USA.