Development of Screening Method for Carriers of Thalassemia and Abnormal Hemoglobin

Abstract

          Thalassemia is a heredity disease that commonly found in Thailand, which the statistic is more than 10,000 people suffer from this disease each year. Prevention and control of disease can be performed through the screening process which should be easy, rapid, economic and reliable ; for example, the red cell osmotic fragility test and the diclorophenolindophenal precipitation test which using Capillary pipette replace with Autopipette. The sensitivity and specificity of this process were compared to the standard method by hemoglobin electrophoresis and percentage of hemoglobin A₂ which found the values of 100% and 97.9%, respectively. The false positive was 1.4% and the false negative was 0.0%. The prevalence of thalassemia in a group of 210 pregnant women at Nakornpathom Hospital was 31.9%  The abnormalities were hemoglobin E trait 17.6%, homozygous hemoglobin E 6.7%, β-thalassemia 7.1% and α-thalassemia 0.5%. The uses of Capillary pipette is as effective as Autopipette because both of them give the same result, but Capillary pipette is cheaper. In conclusion, the techniques of this screening process were easily proved to be simple, rapid, reliable and be suited for every hospitals in a field work.