Correspondence to: Dr. Naghma-e-Rehan, Medical

Because of the suggestions that children with sickle cell trait (Hb/AS) are smaller and lighter, the anthropometric measurements of 50 such children from polygamous families were compared with a matched group of 50 children with normal hemoglobin (Hb/AA) who were offsprings of the same fathers and were living under identical conditions. This technique was adopted to minimize the effects of heredity and nutrition. When these hereditary and nutritional effects were excluded, there were no significant differences between the anthropometric measurements of the two groups. SICKLE CELL TRAIT (Hb/AS), the heterozygous state of abnormal hemoglobin S, is said to be essentially benign unless cir-cumstances are exceptional. The surveys car-ried out on adults1.2 as well as on children in Jamaica and the United States ’ confirm this belief. In contrast, other investigators6 7 have shown that children with sickle cell trait weigh less and that their anthropometric measurements are significantly lower than the corresponding parameters of children with normal hemoglobin (Hb/AA). Apart from being cross sectional in design, thus containing a large proportion for bias, lacking properly matched controls, and using divergent statistical techniques, most of these studies present data comparing the anthropo-metric measurement of selected groups ’of children with sickle cell trait (Hb/AS) to those of normal children (Hb/AA), without taking into account two important factors- heredity and nutrition-which exert a strong influence on the growth of a child. 8-11 There was therefore a need to evaluate the problem by studying a more defined popu-lation, minimizing these hereditary and nu-tritional influences and using comparable statistical techniques