Infrared Spectroscopic Identification of -Thalassemia

Background: The aim of this study was to investigate the potential of infrared (IR) spectroscopy as a fast and reagent-free adjunct tool in the diagnosis and screening of -thalassemia. Methods: Blood was obtained from 56 patients with -thalassemia major, 1 patient with hemoglobin H dis-ease, and 35 age-matched controls. Hemolysates of blood samples were centrifuged to remove stroma. IR absorption spectra were recorded for duplicate films dried from 5 L of hemolysate. Differentiation between the two groups of hemoglobin spectra was by two statistical methods: an unsupervised cluster analysis and a supervised linear discriminant analysis (LDA). Results: The IR spectra revealed changes in the second-ary structure of hemoglobin from -thalassemia pa