OBJECTIVE To review the reproductive health knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors of persons with homozygous beta-thalassemia. DESIGN Case-control study. SETTING Patients treated at a tertiary hospital and community-based healthy controls. PARTICIPANT(S) One hundred and thirty persons, 16 years of age or older, who had homozygous beta-thalassemia and were attending hospital for regular bloo...

Background: Until now, no study has been reported investigating the association between β-thalassemia minor and Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) infection. This study was designed to compare H. pylori infection rate between β-thalassemia minor patients and healthy controls. Methods: A number of 100 β-thalassemia minor patients (50 males, 50 females) and 100 gender-matched healthy...

The ethnic composition of the Brazilian population favors high frequencies of the -alpha3.7 deletion, responsible for alpha-thalassemia, because this mutation is very common in African populations. In spite of its importance, this hemoglobinopathy has been poorly investigated in Brazil, especially at the molecular level. We investigated the prevalence of the -alpha3.7 mutation in 220 individual...

OBJECTIVE To assess the relationship between being beta globin gene carrier and developing insulin resistance. METHODS This study was conducted on 164 subjects including 82 healthy ones and 82 patients with beta thalassemia minor (microcytosis (MCV <80 fl) and hypochromia (MCH <25 pg) and HbA2 ≥ 3.5% using HPLC). Fasting blood glucose (FBS) values of 100-125 mg/dl were considered as impaired ...

By Y. MATOTH, Z. SHAMIR AND E. FREUNDLICH C OOLEY’S ANEMIA has beell reported to occur in members of a wide variety of non-Mediterranean races and ethnic groups.’6 Most of these reports describe sporadic cases. In southern Italians and Greeks, on the other hand, this cotidition is w-idely distributed. These peoples, together with a few smaller and probably genetically related ethnic groups of t...

Dear Editor, Beta Thalassemia major is a genetic disease with an autosomal recessive pattern and is differentiated by severe microcytic hypochromic hemolytic anemia with hepatosplenomegaly, ineffective erythropoiesis and bone marrow expansion. The β-globin (HBB) gene coding for β-chain expression is located on a 50 kb globin gene cluster on the short arm of chromosome 11, whose mutation mediate...

In this study, we aimed to determine the frequency of red cell allo- and autoimmunization and analyze the factors responsible for the development of antibodies in patients with transfusion-dependent thalassemia. This crosssectional study was conducted on 139 patients with thalassemia major and intermedia who received leukodepleted RBC transfusions on a regular basis. Patients with a positive an...

I N THALASSEMIA an inability to form hemoglobin at a normal rate is suggested by the marked degree of erythroid hypochromia in the presence of normal or increased serum iron. On purely theoretical grounds, Rich1 and later Itano2 suggested that in this syndrome there exists a defect in the peptide chains of hemoglobin. This concept was further elaborated by Ingram and co-workers3 who suggested t...